Grading footage as it is imported feels productive and is almost always wasted effort. The order of operations in finishing exists for reasons that become obvious once violated.
Most graded shots will not survive
A finished sequence typically uses a small fraction of what was recorded. Grading before the cut is locked means treating material that will never appear in the delivered piece.
The waste is not only time. Attention spent perfecting a shot creates a reluctance to cut it later, which quietly biases structural decisions toward the footage that received the most work.
Editors describe this as falling in love with a shot, and the cheapest defence against it is deferring any treatment until the shot has earned its place in the sequence.
A grade is judged relative to its neighbours
Viewers do not evaluate a shot in isolation. They notice the change at a cut, so what matters is the relationship between consecutive shots rather than the absolute quality of either.
Two shots that each look correct alone can jar badly when placed together, because the eye adapts across a cut and reads any residual difference as an error rather than as intent.
That relationship cannot be assessed before the order is known, which means grading in advance is optimising against a comparison that has not yet been established.
Continuity work depends on the assembly
Matching shots within a scene is largely about choosing one as a reference and moving the others toward it, and the sensible reference is usually the shot that appears most.
Identifying that shot requires the cut. A scene assembled differently would nominate a different reference and produce a different set of corrections for the same footage.
The same applies to the overall progression of a piece, where a deliberate shift in tone across the running order can only be built once the running order exists.
Some treatment does belong early
Applying a viewing transform so that log footage is watchable during editing is not grading. It is a display convenience that leaves the underlying material untouched.
Correcting an obvious exposure or white balance error at ingest is also reasonable, because it improves the editor's judgement without committing to a final look.
What locking actually means
A locked cut means shot lengths and order will not change, which allows a grade to be built against fixed adjacencies rather than a moving target.
Reopening the edit after grading forces the work to be revisited, which is why late structural changes are resisted far more strongly than late creative notes about the look.