People imagine I edit in a studio. The truth: most of my published work was cut in hotel rooms, airport lounges and one memorable ferry crossing. Here’s the complete road workflow, refined until it survives any country and any Wi-Fi.
Step 1: Ingest the Same Night. Always.
Every card gets dumped the evening it’s shot, no exceptions, no “tomorrow.” Two copies on two separate SSDs, and the drives never travel in the same bag afterward. The 3-2-1 backup rule bends on the road; the 2-drives-2-bags rule does not. I have never lost a day of footage. This sentence is why.
Step 2: Cull While It’s Warm
Same session, I do a fast pass: star the keepers, kill the obvious rejects. Ten minutes of culling while the shoot is fresh in memory saves an hour of archaeology two weeks later. The edit begins the day of the shoot, whether you call it that or not.
Step 3: Proxies Make Laptops Brave
Everything gets proxied on import, lightweight files the laptop cuts like butter, relinked to originals only for the final export. This is the whole difference between editing 4K comfortably in seat 34F and not editing at all.
Step 4: Structure Is the Speed
One identical folder template per project: footage, proxies, audio, exports, delivery. Every project, every country, no thinking. When a client requests a re-export eight months later from a different hemisphere, I find the file in ninety seconds. Boring structure is a superpower.
Step 5: Color and Sound in Controlled Doses
Hotel rooms lie about color, every screen, every lamp. I grade against a calibrated laptop display, in the same lighting conditions each evening, and keep looks consistent with saved presets rather than nightly reinvention. Sound gets headphones I know intimately. Consistency of environment substitutes for perfection of environment.
Step 6: Deliver From Anywhere
Exports upload overnight while I sleep, hotel Wi-Fi’s one great talent. Clients get organized links, labeled versions, and never an excuse involving my location. The entire point of this system is that nobody receiving the work can tell which continent it came from.
The gear list is short; the discipline list is the actual workflow. Build the habits and the world becomes one large, occasionally turbulent edit suite.
