From "leave in place" to Library?

I miss ye olde FCP7 Media Manager, even if the results were often unpredictable.

Now that our program is finished, I'd like to discard the hundreds of gigs of unused material and earlier versions of animations and keep only what went into the published show. I deliberately used external media for this production because I knew I would end up with tons of video litter to discard. I'd like to consolidate and copy all of the used resources into a new library and know I can safely discard everything.

I know there must be a reliable way to do this. Send me to the part of the manual or an online source and I shall be grateful.

Here's what I was going to try:
a. The big working Library is called Episode One.
b. The completed project is called EpisodeOne_v15 (all previous versions can be discarded)
c. Create a new Library, called EpisodeOne_completed, or something helpful.
d. Drag the project icon for EpisodeOne_v15 into the new Library.
e. While I can copy the project to the new Library, FCPX tells me that "media stored in external folders will be left in place." So, rats, that's no good.
f. Umm, not sure what happens next, import? Replace? Relink? None of those sound likely to work.

Thanks for reading this. Any assistance would be appreciated.

I used Consolidate Library to pull all of the external media into the main project library. Not sure if that copied or moved the files. Still checking. Should have looked at the Library size before hitting the Consolidate button.

My next brilliant idea is to copy the EpisodeOne_v15 project into the new EpisodeOne_completed Library and use the Consolidate Library function again.

Dammit.
Having trouble discerning hard links from symlinks. Mr Wolsky say, on page 34 of his book, "[hard links is] a technique used by Apple when it has two directories that need to access the same files, but does not want to duplicate the files because this is unnecessary. … This is why when you consolidate to the library from n external folder, the consolidation is instantaneous, because no files are actually being copied…"

So, I haven't actually copied the external media into the newLibrary, I've just created hard links to the external media? I want to actually throw away the external folders, delete them and empty the trash, because they are full of unused media files.
I've got an external older called Opening. In it are twenty versions of the opening animation. I only need one of those movies, the one that got used in v15. So I want to make sure that movie is physically located, copied into, the new Library and that I can safely delete the folder full of movies.

There seems to bend way to do this. Safely.

Consolidating actually physically copies media into the Library package (external files are left, untouched, not deleted).

What you're reading is how the system works when you copy a media file from one Library, on one drive, to a different Library, on a second drive. That is NOT the same process used in Consolidation.

I'll try deleting some of the unused or useless files and see what happens.
Thank you, Ben, for visiting the forum today.