Reduce unused footage and work tidy and orginzed

[Tom Morton]

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.

[Hector Vera]

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

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[Walter Soyka]

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"));