Solved When can I delete the raw footage?

Yet another probably daft question...
At what point in the process of creating a video project, rendering it, and saving it to HD or burning it to DVD, can I delete the original raw footage?
It is taking up a lot of space in my computer.
I am guessing that if I render the project the footage is saved in that form (a much more compact form?) and that I can delete what's on my camera's memory card - is this right?
Any help here appreciated...
Thanks.

Merrily

Hi MJC,

There is a point where you can archive or delete the raw footage. There are three or possibly four stages.

1) Upload your video raw footage to your hard drive.
2) Edit using Vegas NLE to create the raw footage into your final project masterpiece. Your raw footage is still required on your hard drive at this point as the final masterpiece is only using links to the raw footage and has not created a complete video file.
3) Select the make movie option and choose your final template for output to Mpeg, M2ts or whatever, then render the project to another location, be it on your internal HDD or External HDD or other device.
4) Once you have viewed the final file and are satisfied with it in theory you could delete your raw files.

Personally I would not recommend it. HDD external drives of quite huge capacities are relatively cheap. I store much of my raw footage on an external 3Tb drive. Another alternative is to burn your raw footage to a blue-ray disc. My view is that raw footage cannot easily be re-captured and its best not to destroy it. As you get more skilled at editing you may wish to make an alternative project or even roll snippets from various events into one historic project.

There is always the possibility that you may also wish to pull back some clips to enhance a future project.

I hope this helps

Hi MJC,

I copy the source media from my camera to two different hard drives, assuring the copies are clean, before I delete it from the camera. If during filming I realize I will have a whole lot of dead footage (that footage which will never be used), then I will make an Intermediate render after trimming out the dead footage and replace the original source media with this Intermediate, thereby saving storage space and time later during editing. Usually that is not the case and the original source media is stored as was filmed.

When the production is complete, I 'save as' the project file and check the 'Copy media with project' option. This saves the project file and all the source media required to edit the project in one folder. I keep at least 1 copy of the original source media in a separate folder on a separate storage drive as well.




Videome makes very good points here:

Videome wrote: Personally I would not recommend it. HDD external drives of quite huge capacities are relatively cheap. I store much of my raw footage on an external 3Tb drive. Another alternative is to burn your raw footage to a blue-ray disc. My view is that raw footage cannot easily be re-captured and its best not to destroy it. As you get more skilled at editing you may wish to make an alternative project or even roll snippets from various events into one historic project.

There is always the possibility that you may also wish to pull back some clips to enhance a future project.

An exceptionally clear and helpful answer - many thanks!

Hi MJC,

To go along with what George "Eagle Six" and Videome have sent, as a prior IT guy and current user of Sony/Magix Vegas Pro and Movie Studio Suites, various versions, I would not delete/get rid of the original footage. As mentioned here and in previous posts within the Forum here, recommended to "back-up" or "save to external/additional internal" drives. As George mentioned about "importing" the original footage, send to both your "Working" drive, and that "Other" drive. Amazing how "Mr. Murphy" strikes at the most in-opportune time to "kill" your machine/drive/etc. with footage you just imported to one drive, than delete from that Memory Card/DV Tape/whatever. Yep, definitely talking from experience here. Lost all the photos and videos I took at a yearly function (July/August NASCAR Pocono Race) a few years back. Got everything on the memory cards, forgot to "COPY" down to my server that I have specifically for this reason, and did a BIOS update on my motherboard, which normally wouldn't be a concern these days, but...yep, Mr. Murphy struck with a vengeance! Even though I was able to get the machine back up and running, everything on the "RAID" drive was gone. Won't go into explanation on that, but learned a "Hard and Valuable" lesson that day. Now, even if I have to wait after copying each memory card to the computer I plan to use, then copying that information down to the server BEFORE deleting the files, I do. Sometimes, we forget why we always made "fun" of our elders when they told us to "Just Slow Down".

Happy Editing,

Mike "The Chief" O'Sullivan