FCP 7: Finding Unused Footage

[ This article was first published in the April, 2008, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]

Bob Cusumano writes;

Is there a way to find media not used in a final sequence, that you have digitized? I want to delete whatever was digitized and NOT used in my project.

Larry replies: Yes! It’s easy. And I just realized I’ve never written about this before.

Here are the steps.

1. Select the sequence in the Browser that contains the media you want to keep.

 

 

2. Choose Edit > Find (Cmd+F)

 

 

3. Change For to Unused Media and make sure Selected Sequences is checked.

 

4. Click Final All to find all the unused clips.

 

 

5. All the clips that are not used in your sequence are instantly displayed in a separate Find Results window. You can then decide whether to show them in the Browser or Remove them from your Project by using the buttons at the bottom.

Note: this considers a clip “used” even if only one frame is used in your sequence. Also, this only displays whole clips. If you want to get rid of portions of clips containing media you are not using, you’ll need to use Media Manager for that. Here’s an article that describes how.

Still, this is a very fast and easy way to recover disk space when you’ve finished editing a project.