Identify and purge unused imported files

[priljohnson]

Hey all- I have inherited a little under 1 TB of files and project my friend was working on, which I'm now working on.  The files and folders are organized in a way that, well, in a way my brain just doesn't get, lets say.  And there are tons of files that have been imported that aren’t being used or going to be used.  I’d like to be able to clean it up to work with my brain and also allow me to work off a smaller drive.  Is there a way to just delete all the imported files that aren’t in use in any sequence from the project and the drive?  The 1TB drive is fully backed up on another 1 TB drive.  Both are physically big and I'd love to be working off little a 250 GB drive with an organized project window.

[Meg The Dog]

In the Premiere Pro project panel, switch to the list view and add two columns to the Metadata Display, Video Usage and Audio Usage:

They will display if a clip is used and how many times they have been used, sort the list view by the Video Usage Column, it will group all your unused clips together:

Select all the unused clips and right click on any one of the selected clips. Choose Make Offline from the drop down menu:

You will be presented with a dialog box asking if you want to actually remove the media from disk:

Selecting Media Files Are Deleted and clicking OK is not undoable. Verify the vitality of your backup before committing to this - and generally, it is best practice to have 2 independent, confirmed viable backups before doing something like this.

If you go ahead and do this, your clips will no appear as offline in your Project Panel and your files on disk should be deleted.

MtD