The week after shooting a wedding, my timeline looks like this

Sunday night, unloading the filming gear from the car, my head is already a mess. Roughly 400GB of footage poured out of the three cameras I ran all day. Six SD cards clatter in my pocket, the tripod bag digs into my shoulder, and I know the real work starts now. A lot of people don't realize the week after the shoot is longer than the day itself.

The first thing I do when I get home is back up. I start copying to two external SSDs simultaneously and take a shower in the meantime. This is less a habit than a fear. Once, a card reader froze mid-transfer and corrupted a few files, and ever since then, double backups have been hardwired into me. When the copies finish, I cross-check the file count on each card, and only then do I breathe.

Monday and Tuesday: The Battle with 400GB

Monday morning, I brew coffee, sit down in front of the monitor, and the real organizing begins. I divide the footage by time block: prep scenes, ceremony, reception, and detail shots in between. If the folder structure is a mess, you end up completely lost when it's time to edit, so I'm pretty meticulous about sorting at this stage.

During this process, I do a rough pass to separate usable shots from throwaways. Honestly, more than half the total footage goes unused. Shaky takes, out-of-focus moments, meaningless duplicate angles. Even the remaining source material usually exceeds 100GB. The goal is to finish this organizing by Tuesday, but in reality it more often drags on until Tuesday evening.

Wednesday: Color Grading, My Favorite and Most Exhausting Task

By Wednesday, I open DaVinci Resolve and get into color work. It's the stage I enjoy the most and, at the same time, the one that drains the most energy. Think of it like this: the color palette is to a wedding film what lighting is to a venue. It sets the entire mood, way more than the editing sequence does. So I don't skimp on time here.

The problem is that shooting conditions keep changing. Going from an outdoor ceremony to an indoor reception means completely different color temperatures, and even in the same indoor space, the moment the DJ lights kick on, the image washes purple. Bringing all of that into one consistent tone isn't simple repetition. It's more like solving a puzzle every time. I'll stack three nodes to get natural skin tones in one scene, and in the next scene none of it works. So I build it again from scratch.

I usually match all the daytime scenes first, then move on to the evening and party footage. This way, my eyes stay adapted in one direction and consistency holds up a bit better. For Seattle winter weddings, natural light vanishes by four in the afternoon, so footage shot under artificial lighting makes up nearly half the total. The workload is pretty different from a summer wedding.

AI Tools, How Useful Are They Really?

There's a lot of talk these days about AI-based editing tools. I've tried a few myself. Noise reduction is where they genuinely help. When you've got grainy footage from cranking up the ISO in a dark reception hall, manual processing tends to smear the detail, but AI denoising produces impressively clean results.

On the other hand, AI auto-editing (the kind of tool that automatically picks highlights and assembles a video) isn't something I can actually use yet. A wedding is a story with an emotional arc, and the moments AI selects lean toward "visually pretty shots," missing the context that actually matters. A two-second cut of the bride locking eyes with her father can be far more important to the overall film than a slow-motion shot of the back of the dress. Figuring that out still comes down to human judgment.

So basically, I actively use AI for technical corrections, but not for storytelling decisions. That line is still pretty clear for me.

Thursday to Friday: Editing and Sound

By Thursday, I finally start laying clips on the timeline. I usually begin editing with the ceremony scenes because they form the backbone of the film. Vows, ring exchange, the kiss. The order is nearly fixed, so it's easy to build a structure, and attaching the prep scenes and reception on either side gives the whole piece its flow.

Sound work takes more time than you'd think. The on-location audio is a mix of wind noise, guests chatting, and dishes clinking. If the officiant's mic booms in the wind during the vows, you have to salvage it somehow, and balancing licensed music against ambient sound is a delicate task. There was one shoot where the groom was choking up during his vows. If the background music was even a touch too loud, that trembling voice would get buried. I had to bring the music down to a barely-there whisper.

By Friday afternoon, a rough cut is ready. I watch it start to finish, fix any awkward transitions or timing issues, and then let it sit for about a day. When I watch it again the next day, I catch things I couldn't see before. I'll head to a café near Pike Place, have a cup of coffee, think about something completely different, and by the time I come back my ears and eyes feel reset.

Over the weekend, I finish the final revisions and start the render. One last check before sending it to the couple, and only then does one cycle of the project come to an end. The following week, another shoot is already waiting. As I format the SD cards, I tell myself I'll be more efficient this time, but I always fall back into the same rhythm. Maybe this routine itself is the most efficient way after all.