Would you be able to give a quick runthrough of what you do from the time that the flight is finished, until the final product is complete? Ive always found editing to be cumbersome, and not a labor of love, like some people do.
I know you mentioned Vegas Pro as one of your steps in the process.
Here goes:
1. Remove card from drone. Insert card in computer reader. Copy all MP4 files for the flight to the computer.
2. Drag all files to the Vegas timeline (most other editors let you do the same thing).
3. Use any of the timeline playback or scrubbing tools to go rapidly through the footage. The easiest is to do what you can do in YouTube: just grab the playback "head" (the thing that shows what point in the video is being played) and drag it to scrub rapidly through the video. Doing this you can go through even a one hour video in five seconds. All you are doing is looking for, approximately, the start of each section of video you want to keep.
4. Use more precise playback controls to further adjust each cut point. It makes no sense to obsess about precision. If you are within ten seconds, that's probably close enough.
5. Cut the video at this point. In most NLEs, and certainly in Vegas, there are literally several dozen ways to create a cut, but the simplest in Vegas is to press the "S" key (for "Split"). The video to the left of the cursor is now a separate entity (Vegas calls them "events") from the video on the right.
6. Select the video to the left of the cut and, once selected, press the delete key to remove it.
7. Repeat steps 3-6 for the rest of the video until you have all the flotsam cut out.
8. Export the video timeline as a text-based "Edit Decision List" (EDL). This is simply a text file that has all the in/out points for the edit you just did. It is in CSV format and so can easily be imported into Excel or other apps, if you wish.
9. I wrote a small macro in Excel which opens this EDL and then feeds all the cut information to "ffmpeg" which is a batch cutting tool that can losslessly cut MP4 files, without and re-encoding or re-rendering. If your NLE supports "smart rendering" (i.e., the ability to do cuts-only edits without re-encoding the video) then you don't need to go through this extra step, and simply save the new, much shorter video. The output of this macro is a batch file. I just double-click on the batch file and the multiple calls to ffmpeg are executed and I am left with the cut version of my video in the same folder where I put the original, unedited video.
As I said previously, I can take a one hour video and cut out all the garbage in less than 30 seconds. Once ffmpeg has finished if the new files are only a few GB, it only takes about 20-30 seconds to save that file.
Currently I don't bother to recombine the cut files into a single file.
Later, when I am finished with the project and I archive and backup, I usually delete the original video from the memory card. For me, memory cards are a way to acquire the video and get it onto a computer but they are most definitely
not a media on which I would ever archive something for long term storage. The technology used is not likely to reliably keep the data for long periods of time.