How to reuse clips from previous Events without duplication? One huge Event?

Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to rearrange all my Events, Projects, and clips in such a way that I can continually reuse all the clips I've gathered over the years in new Projects. The situation is this: for work over the past 3 years I've created maybe 60 separate Projects in my Library in the normal way (import clips, created keywords, multiple projects from rough to finished etc... repeat with new Project). The key point is that ALL of these videos are on the same topic... so footage from previous Events quite often could be used as B-roll in future Projects.

The problem I'm having is that I'm not sure how to use clips from previous Events in new Events without "moving" them assuming this would breaking the original Event/Projects they came from. I don't have enough disk space to "copy" older B-roll clips to new Projects.

I thought of merging all Events in my library into one single Event (after creating top level keyword collections (to keep things organized, as if they were still in separate Events)... but then realized I'd have a list of over 100 projects that can't be organized (because Projects can't be put in folders apparently).

Can anyone recommend a good strategy to accomplish this? I'm thinking the 'one huge Event' might be my only option and I'll have to be diligent about naming new projects in an orderly way (ie. name the project by date first so they can be sorted) and just suffer through the growing list of Projects as a disadvantage of this workaround.

Thanks for the help on my first post!

ps. my LIbrary is configured to contain all the original media, not 'Leave in place'.

Are you using a single library? It sounds as if you are.

Projects do not have to be in the same event as the media.

You can move clips between events without breaking any links. You can also option-drag a clip from one event to another to make a copy. This does not duplicate the media.

You don't say.... well sheesh that makes things easy. Just to confirm, I can have Events with their only contents being Projects.... and move all clips into an Event just for clips. This sounds too easy and I'm not sure why I thought moving clips would break things. I'm going to try this now. Thanks Tom, much appreciated.

Thanks Tom

Check this out.


Basically, you import one asset into a Library, duplicating it only makes links to the original, not duplicates of the original.