Pre cutting clips to save hard drive?

I'm looking for an application that will enable me to pre-edit video clips and get rid of the unwanted video to save hard drive space before getting stuck into the editing in FCP. Any suggestions?

I found "First Cut" on the Apple site but can't get to the manufacturers website.

Anyone know if this is available or of an alternative?

Thanks

LOG AND CAPTURE. Don't capture full tapes. Log and capture only the bits that you want. This is but one reason I advocate logging and capturing.

And you can always use the Media Manager to do this from footage that has already been captured. Read up on it in the manual.

My advice, don't use media manager unless you really, really need to. Do not make it a part of your work flow. Many refer to it as the media mangler

Shane's advice is the best. Logging and capturing the takes individually as separate clips will allow you to delete unwanted takes with the touch of a button, allow you to recapture corrupt or missing media, allow much better use of Media Manager later on (sometimes, for example for an online edit, you have no choice but to use Media Manager), and is the professional way of prepping your footage for editing.

You'll have to do this work sooner or later -- there's no way a computer can ever figure out which parts of the footage you really want.

You can clip up your clips in QuickTime Pro. You'd have to capture them first though - can you tell us more about your workflow? Are you looking to get them captured, then make rough choices as a Director or something?

Thanks for the tips so far . . to elaborate on the project,

I'm filming a 16 month expedition around Australia and will probably end up with around 150 - 200 hours of footage to condense into 12 x 55 minute episodes.

The thought of scrolling back and forth through that much tape logging as I go is pretty daunting. At the same time I'd need terrabytes of hard drive to import all of it.

My idea is to import in batches of about 10 hours then use an application to roughly edit out the footage that I'll never use before I start actually editing the film properly. In doing so I want to actually discard the excess footage and recover the hard drive space.

If I used Quicktime to clip up the clips after importing them, will it reduce the file size? and, will it interfere with the timecode in FCP if for example I needed to reimport any footage due to drive failure in the future?

All advice much appreciated.

Is there any reason you don't want to use FCP to do this? It would really be the best path, just use the media manager to keep only what you need and discard the rest.

If the media manager seems too scary, you could always make a timeline into which you dump the rough - so any footage that you want to keep from each tape goes to a timeline of its own, then export this timeline as a self contained movie. Doing this as a 'QuickTime' (rather than a QuickTime conversion) means no loss of quality.

What you will end up with is condensed versions of your tapes, or day's shoot, or location or whatever you decide to group together.

Are you shooting DV?

Are you coming to W.A?