Hi millsy

Two ways i have used are..

If you use premier you could use the project trimmer to rid yourself of all but the used (in the timeline) captured footage. You could archive this and re-capture at a later date any footage you need for the "directors cut."

Alternately you could batch capture the footage originally and save the capture log as part of the project - then you can delete all teh captured footage (when you've finished!). Its a simple matter to then recapture all the footage if needed at a later time.

As long as I've a copy of the project in its current state as well as a capture log archived I can always rebuild it relatively painlessly even if the cat p*sses on the 'puter.

Cheers

tonga