-
Reduce unused footage and work tidy and orginzed
We have an AE template that contains a helpful folder structure in the project window. Sometimes these GFX Folders, or elements folders have not been populated yet with media but are ready for imports.
There must be a way to remove unused footage/media without deleting your empty folder structure. There is a function called “remove unused footage” which actually removes all empty folders too and unused media. Then you have to re-populate your folder structure as it gets blown away.
Love to only remove unused footage and keep empty folders. Having to put a dummy file in each folder seems silly but a workaround, unless I am missing a better way to accomplish this goal.
-
3 Replies
-
If the main point of this is for tidyness, then I wouldn’t worry about removed unused footage. I have OCD, like to keep everything organised, named up correctly and so on, but I still wouldn’t bother going this far.
Footage isn’t stored in your project, it’s only linked so it won’t increase project size much and won’t affect performance unless you pull it into a timeline and render it. Personally I’d just lean towards leaving the footage in and not worrying about being quite so tidy!
Don’t know how you work but also I tend to find that AFX projects are disposable – I use it to do some deeper editing and tweaking, but once I’ve done that and got the results I need, it’s likely I’ll never open the project again, so I try and keep it organised without spending time going overkill. For re-usable templates, I create MOGRTs in AFS that I can easily drop into a Premier Pro timeline.
Not sure if that helps or not, but if you’re sure you want to do it as you’ve described then I think you’ll need a third party plugin or something – not sure how to achieve the results you want.
-
After checking a tutorial on how to remove unused footage, it seems to only keep folders with used footages in it and deletes the empty one. And it does it automatically so as it seems, you may want to do the workaround like you said quick and then remove the 1 used footage from that folder back to another folder with other used footage or the root of all the files within projects. There seems to be no other way around it at this time.
I found this video that may check out from what I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qC8yUfPnVU
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
This is pretty straightforward to script. Please note I’ve done only limited testing, so please make sure it works the way you expect before you rely on it in production.
This script will step through your project, remove footage items that are not used in any comps, and report back a list of what it did. It’ll leave empty folders intact.
It will not preserve items that are referred to by expression only.
app.beginUndoGroup("Remove unused footage, not folders");
var removedItems = 0;
var removedItemNames = [];
for (var i = app.project.items.length; i > 0; i--) {
if (app.project.items[i] instanceof FootageItem) {
if (app.project.items[i].usedIn.length == 0 ) {
var itemToRemoveName = app.project.items[i].name;
var itemProjectPath = [];
var itemParentFolder = app.project.items[i].parentFolder;
while (itemParentFolder.name != "Root") {
itemProjectPath.unshift(itemParentFolder.name);
itemParentFolder = itemParentFolder.parentFolder;
}
itemToRemoveName = itemProjectPath.join("\\") + "\\" + itemToRemoveName;
app.project.items[i].remove();
removedItems++;
removedItemNames.unshift(itemToRemoveName);
}
}
}
app.endUndoGroup();
alert(removedItems + " unused footage item(s) removed. You can undo this if you wish.\n\n" + removedItemNames.join("\n"));
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up