How to delete part of a file.

[Mike Wade]

I have captured a 1 hour HDV tape to Premiere Pro 2. I only want to keep a minute or so and I need to free up space on the HD. How can I save that minute and delete the rest from the drive? I no longer have the original tape or I would merely re-capture the vital minute to a new file and delete the original 1 hour capture.

[Harm Millaard]

Use HDVSplit to split the HDV file based on scene detect. Throw away everything you don't need, including the one hour file, and most importantly, get another disk.

[Adam Gold]

Or, you could mark the in and out points of what you want to keep -- leave a little extra for safety -- drag the clip to the timeline, and then go to Project Manager and create a new trimmed project. It'll keep what you want and get rid of the rest.

If PP2 doesn't have this feature, you could render out the minute you want to a new clip and then delete the old one, but you'd be re-encoding and thus likely experience some quality loss.

[Mike Wade]

Thanks Harm and Adam. Does HDVSplit produce a scene detected _ copy_ of the file ? That means another 1 hour file crammed onto on an already full HD doesn't it ?

[Harm Millaard]

Mike, that is corrrect, it will double the storage requirements from 13 GB to 26 GB untill finished. After that you can recover 13 GB from the original file and a lot of the newly created 13 GB, keeping only what you really need.

But with a 500 GB media disk, are you currently that pressed for space that you do not have more than 20 GB free? If that is the case your performance is very bad and you urgently need another disk. Also, is your boot disk that full as well? Otherwise you can store the HDVSplit files temporarily on the other disk and moving them to your media disk after running HDVSplit and cleaning up.

BTW, I always use HDVSplit for capturing and never PR, because of sync issues and the lacking scene detection in PR.

It is very bad practice to let your disks be filled up beyond 70% because of severe performance degradation, especially if you only use two disks, which is suboptimal to start with.

Adam, I have never used Project Manager to clean up, but from a simple project, where you delete clips from the project window, it reduces the project size, but leaves the files still on the disk, accessible with Explorer, so even manually deleting clips from the project does not affect disk storage of the clips. I doubt whether Project Manager will remove clips from the disk or create new files with the correct in- and outpoints on disk.

[Mike Wade]

Harm, you are absolutely right and in a less imperfect world I would have a couple more footage drives to play with but as things stand I have to make do with what I've got ....
When you say there are 'sync issues' when capturing in PR (Premiere ?) I am not sure what you mean. I have not had a problem in that regard. However HDVSplit's scene detected capture with the option of throwing unwanted scenes off the HD certainly appeals.
Cheers!

[Harm Millaard]

Can't you add an external disk or borrow one to help you out of the space limits?

PR is indeed Premiere Pro (that is the way it is indicated in the launch bar) and in CS3 complaints about losing sync were abundant, but although CS4 has improved, I have still encountered some sync issues (audio getting out of sync with video), so I still use HDVSplit for capture.

[Adam Gold]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

I doubt whether Project Manager will remove clips from the disk or create new files with the correct in- and outpoints on disk.

Actually, in my experience, that's exactly what it does, although it does not, as you point out, actually delete the files from disk -- you need to do that manually. The new project does not include the unused portions of clips, so when you delete the original project in its entirety, you're left with exactly what you need.

But as you noted above you do need the extra space until you delete the old project and all of its assets. But only enough new space to accommodate the new project, which in my experience is usually about 10% of the old project's size. But this can vary greatly -- doing a four-cam multicam edit, where you capture all of every tape, there technically aren't any unused clips, so you have no benefit to doing this. I had assumed it would take only the parts of each clip that were used in the multicam timeline, but no, it keeps the entire source clip. But I digress.