Using Media Manager to delete unused media

I'm running FCP version 4.5, and I have a project I want to delete unused media from.

Last night I selected all the sequences that contained the media I wanted to keep. I then opened the media manager and with the top menu set to "use existing" and the "delete unused media from selected items" function checked with 3;00 handles, I started media manager.

When I came back to my computer, I discovered that Media Manager had hardly deleted any of my media. I had expected it to break up my 20 minute long original clips into many shorter clips, but what it did was just delete the material before the first shot used from the clip, and then delete the material after the last shot used from the clip. In cases where I used 1 second from the head of a 20 minute clip and 1 second from the tail of the clip, it kept all the many minutes of unused material in between.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this what they mean when people say that managing media in FCP is a nightmare?

At least your media is still there. many people have experienced that when they do this, media from the cut had been deleted.

And yes, this is what they mean. The way it acts is so...sporatic. Either it works perfectly, or doesn't. Might be a "phase of the moon" thing...

I was thinking of trying the copy function, where it supposidly creates a new project with just the sequences that you selected, but judging from the bar graphs for original vs. modified media, trying this won't help.

You might try using the FIND menu to do this. Go here and click on Consolidate Media Usage for a how 2

[www.kenstone.net]

Did you click the include Master Clips and affliates box? You don't want these boxes checked.

-CHL

CHL,
The media manager won't allow me to deselect the master clips and affiliates boxes, they are greyed out.

Michael,
I appreciate the link to kenstone.net, and using the FIND menu process definitely helped in trimming down my project.

What I'm hoping to do, however, is break up my giant 20 minute long master clips into just the actual bits and pieces used in my sequences.

In case anyone is interested, after running multiple tests, I was finally able to get my desired results of breaking up my original 20 minute clips into just the parts used in my sequences by using the Recompress function with the create new project option activated.