I built Clip Sweeper because after years of shooting and cutting I had piled up nearly a hundred terabytes of projects and footage, and like every editor I know, my answer to a full drive was to buy another one, which stopped being an answer once drives started costing four to six times what they used to.
The drive that forced the issue was a 20 TB working volume, full, with twelve projects still in flight on it, and I had no confidence about which footage was safe to delete from any of them. Premiere's Project Manager looks at one project at a time, and some of my shows pull clips from previous seasons, so a clip that looks unused in this season's project can still sit on a timeline in last season's. So I wrote a tool that reads every project on the drive at once, and that is what you see in the 47-second demo below.
The video has music and no narration, so the steps live in on-screen text. The rest of this page walks through what the app does, in the order you would use it when a project wraps.
See what you never used
Everyone overshoots, and the waste looks the same on every job: the three-minute clip of black where the camera pointed at the ground while I walked, the shots where I missed focus, the B-roll I downloaded and never touched. Clip Sweeper flags all of it as unused, because it walks every timeline in every project you give it and records which media a sequence references.
In the demo, around 0:07, the filter bar shows the five views you work from: Unused, Online, Deleted, >100 MB and Used. Unused plus >100 MB is the quickest way to the big files, and from there you scrub through the Cards view (0:08) by moving the pointer across a clip, so you can confirm it is junk without opening Premiere.
The Map at 0:22 sizes every project and folder by its bytes on disk. I use it to see which shoot left the most unused media, and I take that back to the producers before the next production day. When I need exact numbers, the Table at 0:24 has every file with its status, size and the projects it belongs to.
Check it before you delete
Nobody deletes footage they cannot prove is safe to remove, which is why the drives keep growing. So Clip Sweeper checks every clip it flags against every other project you load, plus any After Effects comp linked into a timeline, and a clip stays off the list if anything still uses it.
Two settings handle the cases where "unused" gets it wrong. Protected folders (0:26) are for the sound effects, transitions, overlays and brand assets I import into every job: mark the folder once and nothing inside it, proxies included, is ever offered for deletion. Manage Sequence Usage (0:32) handles the opposite problem, where dailies and old assemblies make footage look used when it is not, so in the demo I tick "R1 ASSEMBLE" and "ROUND 2 ASSEMBLE" and they stop counting. The Clip Sweeper 2.3 post explains how those name rules work.
Anything you select goes into a virtual recycle bin first, which the demo shows around 0:12, and nothing moves on disk until you choose what happens to it.
Three ways to reclaim the space
The demo closes at 0:39 on the three actions for the bin:
- Transcode & Replace keeps the clip and shrinks the file. It re-encodes to HEVC and verifies the result before it swaps out the original, which suits footage a client might ask for again.
- Move to Folder sends everything in the bin to another drive, such as an archive disk, with the folder structure kept.
- Delete Permanently removes the files for good, and it makes you type DELETE first, because it is the one action you cannot undo.
Move to Trash and Restore All sit beside them for a reversible first pass.
Get your drives back
At 0:19 the demo shows Macintosh HD, a project SSD and a NAS each getting space back in the same sweep, because Clip Sweeper works across local disks and network mounts over SMB, NFS, AFP and WebDAV. That is the point of the app for me: wrap the project, send the invoice, then run the projects through Clip Sweeper, so any revision the client asks for still opens fully online and there is room on the drive for the next job. I walked Larry Jordan through that workflow when he interviewed me in June.
Try it on your own drive
Scanning, previewing and staging are free with no time limit, so you can see how much space is sitting in unused footage before you pay anything. Unlocking the cleanup actions is a one-time $19.99 direct licence with no subscription, and you can buy it here or get it from the Mac App Store.
Clip Sweeper runs on macOS 14 or later and reads Premiere Pro projects from CC 2017 on. DaVinci Resolve works with one extra step, a Usage = 0 smart bin exported as a CSV, and the Resolve walkthrough has the exact steps. If you would rather try Premiere's own tools first, deleting unused clips in Premiere Pro covers what they can and cannot do, and the Clip Sweeper homepage has the full feature list.