How to cull a full wedding day of footage before your next shoot
Here is the fast version. To cull a full wedding day of footage, work in one pass: import every card into one place, let a tool rate every clip while you step away, then review a ranked shortlist with reasons instead of scrubbing the whole day. Keep, cut, and re-order the picks, then send your selects to your editor as a timeline. The manual way — watching six hours back, marking in and out points, dragging keepers into bins — is the part that eats your week. The steps below give you a workflow you can run by hand today, and show where a rating tool takes the scrubbing off your plate.
What "culling" a wedding shoot actually means
Culling wedding footage means reducing a full day of raw clips down to the moments worth keeping — the first look, the vows, the toast that landed, the dance floor at its peak — before you start the edit. It's the unpaid half of video editing: on a heavy shoot you spend longer finding the good moments than assembling them. Done by hand, you scrub every clip end to end, mark in and out points, and sort keepers into bins. A rating tool does that first pass for you. Sisyphos is a local-first desktop app that watches your raw footage, finds the best moments, and explains every pick by what's on screen — motion, sound, beat, and framing. Nothing leaves your Mac. You review the shortlist it proposes, with a reason on every clip, and stay the one who decides what makes the cut.
Wedding footage is the hard case for most AI tools. The ones that cut by transcript need people talking to find a moment, so they go quiet on a first look, a drone pass over the venue, or the dance floor. A tool that judges by what's on screen can rate those anyway — which is the whole point of a culling pass built for events.
How to cull wedding footage fast, step by step
The pass has four steps. You stay in charge through all of them.
- Import the whole day into one place. Every card, both cameras, ceremony through party. Whether you do this by hand or point a tool at the folder, the goal is the same: one library, nothing missed. On your machine, the files never move off it.
- Let a tool watch the footage and rate it. This is the step that used to be your evening. Instead of watching six hours back yourself, a tool measures motion, sound, beat, sharpness, and framing on each clip and ranks the moments. You go make coffee.
- Review the ranked shortlist with reasons. You scan a list of proposed keepers, each with a plain-language reason, instead of blind-scrubbing the whole card. More on why the reasons matter below.
- Approve, veto, re-order — then send your selects on. Keep, cut, or re-order the picks, then hand the approved selects to your editor as a timeline.
That's the shape of it. The two steps that decide whether the pass is honest — the review and the handoff — are worth a closer look.
Reviewing the picks with reasons, not blind scrubbing
Blind scrubbing is the slow part of culling, and it's slow because you're re-watching everything to re-decide what you already half-remember. Reviewing a ranked shortlist is faster because the tool has done the first sort — but only if you can trust it, and you can only trust a pick you can question.
That's where the reasons come in. Every pick comes with a reason. Every reject, too. A clip can fall out because it's "too similar to a better take" or because there was "too little happening" — causes an editor recognizes, not codes. So you scan the rejects as fast as the keeps: each one tells you what it was and why it lost. Ask "why isn't this moment in my cut?" and you get an answer, not a shrug. If you want the mechanics of how a tool decides which seconds are the good part, that's its own post.
This is also the step where you stay the editor. The tool proposes; you decide. Approve the list as-is, change the order, or throw picks out and pull others in. Nothing is locked until you say so.
The handoff: sending your selects to DaVinci Resolve
A culling pass is only useful if the keepers land in your editor ready to work. The last step is the handoff to your NLE. By hand, that means creating a timeline and dragging each keeper onto it at the right timecode. A tool can build that timeline for you — Sisyphos pushes the chosen clips into your running DaVinci Resolve Studio with one click, linking your original files at the correct timecode, and also exports FCPXML and EDL for Premiere or Final Cut. What lands is a rough cut you can open and change, with the reasons riding along, not a locked export. The full selects-into-Resolve workflow has its own walkthrough.
How much time does culling a wedding actually save?
Keep the math honest and do it with your own numbers. Say you shot six hours across the day. Watching it back even once is six hours at your desk before you mark a single clip — and most editors watch the important stretches twice. Add marking in and out points and sorting bins, and a single wedding's cull can swallow a working day before you cut anything.
A rating pass changes what you spend time on, not the laws of physics. The tool does the watch-everything step while you're away from the desk; your time goes to reviewing a ranked shortlist instead of the full card. The review still takes real minutes — but it scales with the length of the shortlist, not the length of the shoot. That's the gap a culling tool closes, and it's the same gap behind every "AI saves you hours" claim, shown with real shoot-ratio numbers instead of a marketing percentage.
Your footage is your client's. Keep it that way.
Wedding footage is confidential — a couple's day, filmed close. So where it gets processed matters. With Sisyphos, the watching runs on your Mac; the footage never leaves the machine. Only a few still frames plus the measurements go to the AI judge, under your own key, at cents per clip with a hard cap. One license is €129 at launch, perpetual, with 12 months of updates. Perpetual, because it runs on your machine.
Sisyphos is in development. The workflow above — a rated culling pass you can question, then one click into your NLE — is what it is being built to do. Join the waitlist and you hear it first when it ships.
You stay the editor.