Earlier today, filmmaker and editor Leland Dutcher contacted me about his new utility: Clip Sweeper.
Clip Sweeper is a macOS app that finds the unused footage in your Premiere or Resolve projects and helps you reclaim that drive space without the fear of deleting the wrong thing.
Intrigued, I emailed Leland to learn more.
Every project has unused media. Click to see larger image.
Larry: Why did you create this?
Leland: Over years and years of working as a creative I’ve piled up nearly a hundred terabytes of projects and footage I couldn’t keep ignoring. Some season of shows use clips from previous seasons and it’s not easy to know what’s worth keeping or “Archiving”. Everyone I’ve ever encountered keeps it all on a drive and buys a new one, with the cost of drives these days being 4-6X as much that’s no longer a solution that’s a massive cost to eat.
Larry: What problem were you trying to solve?
Leland: Clip Sweeper makes you feel safe deleting media from your drives. It independently reads every Premiere file you provide it, walks the entire tree of each timeline in those projects, and understands what sections of your footage WERE and WERE NOT used.
The new Map display. Click to see larger image.
Larry: How does it work?
Leland: That 3 minute black clip of the camera pointing at the ground while you were walking, the missed focus shots, the B-roll you forgot you downloaded and never touched – it flags as unused.
After it understands the usage of your media in the timelines and has identified unused clips, it checks against every other project you provided ensuring there’s no inter-project dependencies. If a Premiere project has a dynamic link or nested comp from After Effects it walks that entire project as well to ensure that nothing you actually need to maintain an a perfect archive of your project where every sequence is fully online and editable.
The new Cards view. Click to see larger image.
The user can then scrub through them quickly in the new Cards view to decide if they want to:
Larry: What feature are you especially pleased with?
Leland: A new view in V2 is Map and it’s now crucial to how I archive and give feedback now to my producers. I can see which project resulted in the most unused media at a glance and let that inform the next production day. Everyone overshoots but do you ever do anything about it?
Options on what to do with unused media. Click to see larger image.
Larry: Where does it fit in an editorial workflow?
Leland: Clip Sweeper is a companion for the least sexy part of creative workflows: the wrap and archive. Send the invoice, then send the projects to Clip Sweeper. Feel confident that any revision the client asks for can be accommodated plus making room for the next project.
Larry: What does it cost?
Leland: Currently free so snag it if you want it, will go one time paid for new downloads after dev + feature roll out settles down. Something reasonable like $15-20.
Larry: Where can we get it?
