Some of the media in my bin, I know I will never use. Is there a way to delete this from my hard drive from inside Edius?

If you do a right click on any media clip in your bin, you will notice that there are two delete options.

The first delete option, simply removes the media from your project, but does not remove it from your hard drive.  This is handy when you want to streamline your project, you can get rid of media that you know that you will not need in your current project, but will probably use in a different project on another day.

The second delete option, "Delete File will remove the media, not only from your project, but will also delete it from your hard drive.  Needless to say, you don't want to get these two options confused!

Some of you are probably saying at this point....  "Why is the "Delete File" option 'greyed out' on my computer?"  The short answer is that Edius 6 will no longer allow you to delete files from your hard drive, from your bin, UNLESS, the files that you want to delete are located inside your current project folder. If the media that you wish to delete, is located outside your project folder, the delete option from the drop down menu will be "greyed out"

Again, you may be asking, “Why”?   And you would be asking a good question!

To answer it fully, or give you the “long” answer, I will need to pull out my soap box here......

Tap tap tap…. Anyone listening??

Until Edius 6, a part of my every day workflow was to drag unwanted clips to a “Trash” folder that I had created in my bin file structure and then at the end of the day, “take out the trash”, thus freeing up space on my hard drives.I am no longer able to do this, and it has me a little miffed!

I might be speculating a little here, but it would seem that somewhere along the pathway between Edius 5 and Edius 6, the program designers got some bad advice from some of their beta testers, that led them to believe that it would be a good idea to start forcing Edius users to keep all of the media that they wanted to use, INSIDE the project folder. Some Edius editors claim that this is the best workflow, and apparently believe this so strongly that they have convinced GV to start doing small things like “greyed out” options in an attempt to force everyone to do things the way the THEY believe to be best.

One of the things that I have liked the most about Edius is that from the very beginning it has been a program that has let the user define how they would like to use the program. It is a sad day for me, when I start seeing this freedom being taken away!

If you are a wedding video producer, or an event producer that films the school plays at your local high school, then this methodology of keeping all of your media together in one location, under the project folder, would probably be a good idea. But for documentary producers like myself, or news cutters, this makes absolutely no sense at all!  Many times when I start a project today I may access media that I have shot over the last five years that may be spread out over ten different hard drives. Do you really believe that I am going to want to bring all of that media together under my project folder? And if you see that this makes no sense at all, can you please give me back my option to be able to delete media, that is outside the realm of my project folder?  Please?

Over the years, I have captured tapes in their entirety every time I get back from a shoot. There are always a lot of shots that end up getting captured that I know I will never use. Each time that I work with the media I find new shots that could be deleted. Now, Edius no longer lets me do that.

Edius programmers….. please give us our freedom back! Not all of us are wedding photographers!  

(No offence intended to wedding photographers! I have the highest respect for you guys and gals! You are a special breed! I could not do what you do!)

Having said that, I shall now step down from my soap box and go my merry way!