[Lee Davies]

This is one of the traps with treating Project Manager as a perfect “what did I use?” report.

It is sequence-based, but the media copy/consolidate result can still be affected by how the footage was imported and what kind of media it is. Spanned camera media, long-GOP codecs, merged clips, speed changes, master clip effects, plugins, and transcode limitations can all push Premiere toward copying more than you expected instead of making a neat trimmed package.

So I would use Project Manager for what it is good at: making a working archive/handoff folder for a selected sequence. I would not use the output as proof that everything outside the package is safe to delete.

Safer archive pass:

1. Duplicate the project.
2. Import/copy only the final sequence into a clean project if the source project is messy.
3. Run Project Manager or a dedicated collect tool.
4. Open the collected project with the original media offline/disconnected.
5. Watch for missing media, AE links, fonts, plugins, and relink prompts.
6. Keep the original camera media until the archive has been verified and the job is truly closed.

Project Manager can save space, but it is not a storage audit layer.