DaVinci Resolve has something Premiere editors quietly envy: a menu item called Clean Up Project that actually removes things. Not from a bin. From the project database. From disk, in some cases. It's the closest any major NLE comes to a real reclaim button, and it still doesn't go all the way.
If you've ever right-clicked Remove Unused in Premiere and watched your drive stay exactly the same size, you already understand the gap.
Where to Find It
In Resolve, head to the Media Pool, right-click on the project or a bin, and you'll find Clean Up Project (sometimes labeled under the project menu depending on version). It opens a dialog that gives you actual choices: clean unused clips from the Media Pool, delete unused render cache files, clear unused proxies, clear unused timeline thumbnails.
Each one is a checkbox. Each one does what it says.
This is like a script supervisor who not only keeps notes on every take, but actually walks back to the warehouse and tells the camera assistant which rolls to ship to long-term storage. Premiere's script supervisor takes detailed notes and then goes home.
What It Actually Removes
The "delete unused render cache" and "delete unused proxies" options are the cleanest wins. These are files Resolve generated itself. It knows exactly which ones are still tied to live timelines and which ones are orphaned from edits you've already changed. Running this on a six-month-old grade project can free up tens of gigabytes immediately.
The "remove unused clips from Media Pool" option clears clip references from the Resolve database. If those clips were inside Resolve's managed media folders (the equivalent of FCP's "copy to library" workflow), the underlying files can also be removed from disk. If you imported in place from external drives, the clip leaves the Media Pool but the original file stays exactly where it was.
This is the same line every NLE has to draw. Did Resolve put the file there? Then Resolve can take it away. Did you point Resolve at footage that lives somewhere else? Then Resolve only manages the reference, not the file.
Where It Still Falls Short
Two specific gaps.
First, Clean Up Project works one project at a time. If you have a drive with twenty Resolve projects spanning a year of work, you have to open each one, run the cleanup, save, and move on. There is no "scan this drive and tell me what's unused across every project on it" mode. A clip that looks unused in Project A might be the hero shot in Project B, and Clean Up Project has no way to know that.
Second, the disk-side cleanup only reaches files Resolve manages. Most working editors I know import in place from the camera-original folders. That means Clean Up Project will happily clear the Media Pool entry for an unused 4 TB shoot day, and the 4 TB is still sitting on the drive when you're done.
Compare that to Premiere's situation, where the gap is even wider. Remove Unused doesn't even touch generated files cleanly. Resolve is genuinely ahead here. It just isn't all the way home.
What Resolve Gets Right Conceptually
The thing Blackmagic understood is that "unused" needs to be a category the application surfaces to the user. Premiere treats unused and used clips almost identically once they're in a project. Resolve at least admits the category exists and gives you a button to act on it.
Resolve also handles the render cache and proxy side cleanly because those files are unambiguously its responsibility. Premiere's media cache lives in a global folder that can serve dozens of projects, which makes "unused" much harder to define. Resolve scopes the cache per project, so it knows what's safe to drop.
If you cut commercial work in Resolve and run Clean Up Project at the end of every job, you're doing better than 95 percent of editors at any other NLE. You'll still leave significant reclaim on the table from in-place imports, but the per-project hygiene is solid.
The Math That Still Hurts
Even with Resolve's tools, editors typically import three to five times more footage than ends up on a timeline. Clean Up Project handles the cache and managed-media slice of that. The much larger slice, camera originals sitting on shared drives that nobody is auditing across projects, is still untouched.
On a 10 TB working drive, that's potentially 3 to 6 TB of footage you're paying to store and protect for no working reason. The calculator makes the cloud-storage version of that math concrete pretty fast.
A Fair Closing Note
Clip Sweeper is Premiere-first today, partly because the .prproj XML is the easiest reference graph to walk and partly because Premiere editors have the worst built-in story. Resolve already gives you a credible single-project cleanup. The thing Resolve doesn't give you, multi-project drive-wide visibility into camera-original media, is exactly the gap on the roadmap. DaVinci support is in scope. The database format is the puzzle.
In the meantime, run Clean Up Project at the end of every job. Do it as part of your delivery checklist, alongside the locked timeline export and the color archive. It's the closest any NLE gets right now to actually reclaiming the drive.