Needin' a Little Nuclear Help Here
 

I'm sure tghat I read it somewhere but I can't find, in Adobe Premiere, where you can toss out the clips you don't use in a timeline and production. Say for example I capture Clip A and save it along with Clips B, C, D, E and F. In assembling my movie, I import all the clips but elect not to use B and D. Now, B and D are still taking up 200M on my hard drive for no reason and in my import file for the production. Now I know I can go back in and just select B and D and delete them from my prod. list and hard drive but whay if I have a hundred different clips saved and a hundred different clips imported and 50 I'm not using but are still living on my hard drive despite not being used in the timeline. Does Premiere provide a searsh and destroy tool that with the click of a key looks at my timeline and says "Hey, this, this and this are not being used. Do you want to nuke them from your hard drive?"

The only way I know how to do this is to create a Trimmed copy of the project into a new folder:
- Original Project: "D:\Project" (A, B, C, D, E, and F files in here)
- Trimmed Project: "D:\Trimmed" (A, C, E, and F files get created in here)

You'd then just delete "D:\Project" and then "D:\Trimmed" becomes your working directory.

Now, the downside of this is that your A, C, E, and F files (assuming they are all being used in the timeline) would get hard-edited down to only what was needed in the timeline, so you'd need to be careful there. Trimming is really supposed to be used as your final step after all your editing is done and your project is ready to be archived. I simply use the feature a bit creatively. ;)

I used this technique on project with over 700 photos and 12 hours of footage. Once I edited it all down to what I needed, I Trimmed the project and was left with a project that had a nice small footprint.

Glad to see you came up for air. I figured since I hadn't heard from you, you must be up to your ears in the real world since leaving the comfort of the studio. I'll be with Adobe on Thursday so if you haven't gotten an answer from the Board here, I'll get one from Adobe. The people here, as you know, as pretty smart though so you should get a few different answers by then. More than one way to skin a cat as they say. Seeya.

I spoke with Adobe this morning and the word is that Matt is 100% correct. The Trimmed option is the oly way to accomplish the task. Go to Project and then to Project Manager and set the parameters you want there. In that pop-up window, you'll notice an Include Handles option and it's set by default to 30 frames. What this means is that all of your source files which may or may not have names different than the corresponding names in your project directory get renamed to the exact name you assigned in your directory and trimmed to include only 30 frames before and after to allow for transitions. So, if you had a :30 sec capture and only assigned :20 seconds to be used in the project, only that :20 sec plus 30 frames on the front and 30 frames on the back end would be retained in the new directory and the rest discarded. Thus, when you do, correctly, as Matt states and create a Trimmed project and wipe the HD clear of your original captured footage, you can not go back in and select longer portions of the original clips to include in a modified version of your trimmed project because they're gone. For this reason, it's a LAST step in your creative process. See, I told you there were some pretty smart people here.

The project manager option is great to save hard-drive space.

But if you just want to get rid of unused clips without using the Project Manager (which trims the used clips), then look at the Video Usage and Audio Usage columns in the bin: select the clips that have no usage, right-click, unlink media with the delete from hard-drive option. The good thing about this is that the references to the deleted files remain in your project as unlinked media: you can easily recover any of them by inserting the tape in your camcorder/deck and doing a batch capture.

Sorry all. I have been putting in some pretty long hours. Antway, thanks for the tips. They're working out great and I've used both to really clear out some space. It's funny the things you know you'll want to use you don't and the things you originally hated you use.