Basic Question About Libraries

It's time for my annual two week FCPX job, every year I appear on here and ask a few dumb questions!

Anyway, I am using a Thunderbolt 2 drive onto which I copied all my original media for last years job. I have a FCPX library for the job, and if I look at the package contents, I have folders containing aliases to the original media, and folders containing transcoded media, high quality and proxy.

What I want to know is, can I now safely delete the folders of original media to free up space? I'm unlikely to ever need to re-edit the job and I assume because I have all the transcoded media I will be fine anyway?

Any help gratefully received.

It sounds like you have your library set up to "read" original files from another drive. At some point you optimized the media and have that media "Managed" in the library.

I would NOT delete the original media because it sounds like your library is "sym linking" to the original media on the other drive. At very least, keep the original media on some other drive/BRD/DVD whatever, just in case you need those files, or someone else may need the files.

You can "Consolidate" original media into the FCP library. This would essentially have all your original media as well as any transcoded files.

Someone else can fill in my gaps.

Good luck

Jonathan

Taking one project as an example, the original media outside the library is 12.3GB, the transcoded high quality media is 34.6GBG and the proxy media is 4.4GB.

The original media is H264 files from Canon dslrs, I very much doubt I will ever need it again.

The question is wether you want to archive your old footage or not. If you want to keep it for whatever reason, you should keep the original files instead of the optimized media. Why? Because they are smaller! You can always recreate optimized media through FCPX.

If you don't want to archive anything, well, just delete it all.

Best,
Sebastian

Thanks folks, backed them up to an old disc I found.