Deleting stuff

[Betsy Moore]

My feature project is absolutely devouring up massive hard drives, is there any way I can delete clips that I know I will never use from my external hard drive? It seems like Final Cut makes it very hard to absolutely erase something--for good reasons of course but...

[Rob Lohman]

I'm not a FCP user so I don't know if it will start complaining about missing
files, but you can delete any files of your drive by opening it in finder.

[William Hohauser]

Originally Posted by Betsy Moore

My feature project is absolutely devouring up massive hard drives, is there any way I can delete clips that I know I will never use from my external hard drive? It seems like Final Cut makes it very hard to absolutely erase something--for good reasons of course but...

This depends on the state of your project. If you were very close to completion I would recommend the Media Manager option in FCP, however if you are still in the middle the best option is this.

1) Manually delete files from the bin in FCP. If you get any warnings from FCP don't delete it. This technique won't work if you captured entire tapes in one file per tape instead of logging and capturing individual clips.

2) After cleaning up the bin, save a copy of the project (don't alter the original project file) and quit FCP. Find the corresponding files on the hard drive and move them to the trash. Don't empty the trash yet!

3) Open the copy of your FCP project and see if you get any missing file warnings. If you do, close FCP and move the listed missing files back to where you found them.

4) Reopen FCP to double check, if FCP launches without a problem you can then empty the trash. Edit with the copy of the project file from now on.

If this all sound too scary, the best thing to do is purchase an external FireWire drive and start capturing to that.

[Betsy Moore]

Thanks William! Whoops, I did download the entire tape, thinking I could delete what I definitely could never use later. Does this mean I'm screwed, Blued, and tatooed? Although the log and capture did automatically divide up the clips everytime I turned the camera off and on...

[Harry Bromley-Davenport]

There is a way of doing what you want in the media manager. It will remove all material that you are not using and leave "handles". I believe that there are many options you can choose.

However, be afraid! MM was always a little bit dodgy and I've never used it. You might want to go to the board Los Angeles Final Cut Pro users Group and ask there.

For God's sake don't do anything rash. I'm kinda frightened for you. I truly feel that, since your project is incomplete, you probably shouldn't risk screwing around with the files. See if you can spring for an extra firewire external drive.

Best wishes,

Harry.

[William Hohauser]

Originally Posted by Betsy Moore

Thanks William! Whoops, I did download the entire tape, thinking I could delete what I definitely could never use later. Does this mean I'm screwed, Blued, and tatooed? Although the log and capture did automatically divide up the clips everytime I turned the camera off and on...

Well this is where I recommend getting more hard drives and urge you to leave the data alone. A few hundred dollars is worth avoiding the agony of losing precious worktime.

Media Manager can help you here but as Mr. Davenport stated, it's not fool proof at all. And you'll need enough room to export the project and the used files anyway.

For two years now I have one really big documentary sitting in a computer, taking up mounds of room, but I installed enough hard drives that I'm able to use the computer for other projects as well. The documentary is backed up as well but I'm not going to do anything drastic until it's finished this year. All files used and unused stay until it's mastered. The backup drive will go on a shelf until the end of time.

Log and capture does not divide the clips if you are working in DV. FCP creates sub clips but those are markers on the larger clip. HDV capture in FCP does make seperate clips which is a great help.

[Betsy Moore]

Good enough boys, you convinced me and thanks for saving me from a fate worse than debt:) I'm just going to spend the few extra hundred and leave everything on the hard drive... It took so long just load the darned things:)

[Greg Boston]

Most folks recommend that you use media manager because it won't screw you up like you can by moving files around yourself.

Betsy, I am with you and I know what you need to do because I have done this already to preserve drive space.

After setting in/out points on your individual clips, select the ones that you know you won't need the extra media from.

Open Media Manager, choose 'use existing' and lower down choose delete unused media. However, for editing purposes, leave handles of 1 or 2 seconds.

You'll get a summary paragraph above and the bar graphs will show you how much space you are going to free up with the operation you are about to perform.

I'm including a screen grab for you that I quickly set up by selecting 5 clips of a project. You can see how little of the clips I am using by the discrepancy in the bar graphs.

When you click OK, you are going to get a stern warning from FCP that you are about to permanently remove the media from your drive and that the operation is not reversible. But the media you're removing is the stuff outside of the in/out points+handles which is what you want to do.

regards,

-gb-

[Chris Harris]

If you had to set in and out points multiple times on one clip, wouldn't the Media Manager would only take the last set of points into consideration and delete the ones you previously set?

[Johan Forssblad]

I use Capture Now to ingest a whole HDV tape.
Then I recognize several clips I like to permanently delete immediately.
I wonder if there is a faster method to delete a captured clip than this:

1. View and mark the clip in the FCP browser.

2. CTRL-Select "Reveal in Finder".

3. Move it to the trash with Command-Backstep.

4. Click on FCP to activate the FCP window again.

5. Now FCP says the clip is offline which you already know. Answer Continue by pressing Return.

6. Click at the red-crossed clip in the browser and delete it with Backstep.

Isn't there any faster way of doing it (besides logging and just ingesting the right clips in the beginning)?

[Cole McDonald]

The problem is that the whole tape is captured as one file (I do this too). So any "Reveal in Finder" you do will send you to the same clip. I've also done the progressive in points on my feature, I've learned to subclip everything while editing, but I'm not sure how this is picked up by the Media Manager...I've avoided it entirely by purchasing many internal hard drives and a wiebetech drive dock...which allows me to connect bare drives externally via firewire. Makes Harddrives like removable media :) Once I start a new drive, I change my capture location in the preferences to the new drive so everything is self contained when I move to the next drive. This allows me to swap drives to work on old projects if necessary.

[Johan Forssblad]

Hi Cole,
Thank you for your answer. However, every time the camorder is started a new clip/file is generated (at least in HDV) while doing "Capture Now". Thus a 60 minute tape could typically generate 100 files or so for me.

So all false starts and bad takes could be deleted in the beginning to reclaim HD space and declutter the workspace.

Why couldn't there be a quick command to trash these clips permanently and remove the corresponding link in FCP at the same time?
Or is there one which I haven't found yet?

The one you are speaking about is a different situation with one long clip where you are picking several sections out of it which usually isn't my problem. Here the Media Manager is more suited, I believe.

BTW I prefer this method because I use a Canon XL H1 at 25F and there is no available deck on the market which can read the tape.
So better to save on the tape mechanism by using it as little as possible and avoiding the Log and Capture. So I prefer to ingest the whole tape which can be done without any supervision and then extract the good takes at the computer's much faster interface.

Think the Log and Capture is remaining from the good old days with analog production ... Hope I don't put you on fire, professionals out here!

Thanks for any input. /Johan

[Cole McDonald]

ah...all of my subclipping (including dv start/stop detect) happens after I capture.

non-professional, digital only filmmaker here. My feature was 47 hours of tape...1 tape=10Gb I don't have a drive that big :)