Getting Rid of Unwanted Source Footage

Many times when you digitize, you wind up with unwanted media before and after the desired portion of the clip. Because video, especially, takes up tremendous amounts of hard drive space, you probably want to delete the unnecessary footage surrounding your clip. Besides running out of hard drive space faster, having a great deal of excess footage also becomes a problem when it's time to back up your project for archiving and storing on the shelf. Keeping that unwanted footage for every clip might cause you to need extra backup storage tapes (usually DAT or DLT tapes), which can get expensive.

tip

Always leave some room on each side of the portion of the clip you are using. These handles can come in handy if you need to trim the clip or add a transition.

Premiere automatically makes a duplicate of your project when you select to trim a project. Each in and out point becomes the starting and ending point for those clips, removing the unwanted portions before the set in point and after the set out point. You can choose to keep handles for each clip. Handles are the extra amount of footage (already digitized) you choose to keep before a given in point and after the out point on each clip used in your project. Any clips that are not used in your project are not copied to the new duplicate version of your project.

note

Premiere copies only clips used in the project's sequence. It does not bring over any clips not used in the sequence, even if they have in and out marks.

To remove unwanted source footage, do the following:

1. Make sure that the project you want to trim is currently open.

2. Select File > Utilities.

3. Select Project Trimmer from the pop-up window.

4. Select Create trimmed batch list from the Project Trimmer window, as shown in Figure 3.23. This can be used to redigitize timecoded source material at a later time.

   Figure 3.23. The Project Trimmer window allows you to save only the portions of your source materials used in your timelines, plus any desired handles.

   

5. Select Copy Trimmed Source Files. This creates new copies of the source material from the marked clips, plus their given handle.

6. Enter the number of the frame you want to keep as the handles for each marked clip.

7. Click Create Project.

   note

   If you're working in NTSC formats (used by American television standards), there are 30 frames per second. Therefore, if you want to save 2-second handles on each side of your marked clips, enter the value of 60 in this field. PAL formats work on 25 frames per second.

   tip

   Remember to save your original project before trying to create a trimmed version. If you do not, an error message appears, prompting you to save the original project first, as shown in Figure 3.24.

   Figure 3.24. Premiere prompts you to save your original version before creating a trimmed version.

   

8. Type a name for the new version, and select a destination. You cannot save the new version in the same location as the original file.

9. Click OK.

10. Type a name and a destination for the Batch List file.

11. Click OK.

After you have copied and checked your material, you can delete the original project and its related media. The "condensed" files retain the same quality as your originally digitized material. I highly recommend doing this for the first time with a test project, just to make sure you are comfortable with the procedure.