Trace+

See every clip your project no longer needs – and every clip it can’t do without.

And how many gigabytes of media on disk nothing is using any more.

Overview

Trace answers where is this one clip used? Trace+ answers the question you cannot ask one clip at a time: what is in this project, and what of it is doing nothing?

It walks every bin, matches what it finds against every timeline, and gives you three views of the same index – one clip, one sequence, or the whole project. Then it lets you act on the answer: label it, mark it, file it away, and put it back.

It never touches a file on your disk. Nothing Trace+ does can cost you footage. Most of what it does moves things – into a bin, and back out again – and Premiere undoes that with Cmd/Ctrl-Z like any other edit.

Two things it can remove from the project, each behind a button that names the count before you press it: empty bins it has proved have nothing anywhere inside them, and spare imports – an item pointing at a file another item already points at, over exactly the same in and out points. Anything covering a different part of the file is a subclip, not a copy; Trace+ refuses those and says so on screen. Every media file keeps at least one item, always.

What Trace+ is not

Requirements

• Premiere Pro 25.6.0 or newer. Trace+ is a UXP plugin; earlier versions cannot load it at all.
• macOS or Windows. Same panel, same behaviour.
• An internet connection once, to activate. After that it works offline.

Install

1. Open the Creative Cloud desktop app, then double-click the .ccx file. Creative Cloud installs it. Nothing happened, or a message saying Creative Cloud cannot open it? Install it from Terminal or Command Prompt instead.
2. Restart Premiere Pro.
3. Window > UXP Plugins > Trace+.
4. Drag the panel wherever you want it. It docks like any other.

Your licence

Open ☰ > Help & licence… and paste the key from your order email, then press Activate. The panel unlocks immediately.

• Seats. A Trace+ key covers 2 machines, and a Trace+ Studio key covers 10. The card tells you how many you are using and how many you have.
• Moving to another machine. Press Remove on the old one first. That frees the seat straight away; you do not need to email anybody.
• Offline. Activation needs the internet once. After that the panel reads a cached answer, so a laptop on a plane still works.

Trace+ Studio is one key for up to 10 machines, for a team, an edit suite or a post house. Everyone activates the same key the same way, and the Help & licence window shows how many of the 10 are in use. Remove works exactly as above, so when someone leaves or changes computer their seat is free again in one press. Need more than 10? Get in touch and I’ll set it up.

Quick start

1. Open a project and click Project – the clapper-board button on the toolbar. Do not select anything.
2. Wait for the walk. Trace+ reads every bin and every timeline, and says how far it has got.
3. You are looking at every media file in the project. The switch above the list flips between Used and Not used.
4. Tick a few rows on the Not used side and press Move to _UNUSED.

That is the whole product in four steps. Everything below is detail.

One clip, one sequence, everything

Trace+ has three views and you do not switch between them with a menu. What you have selected decides which one you get.

A selection always wins. Click a clip while you are in the project view and the panel follows you to that clip. With the timeline tile pressed, a clip you click in a sequence counts as a selection too – whichever you touched last is the one on screen. Project view is sticky rather than automatic: press the button to go there, and it stays until you select something.

One clip

Identical to the free panel, with two additions.

The source coverage bar draws the whole clip as a strip with the parts you have used filled in, and tells you the longest stretch you have never touched. On a forty-minute interview that is the difference between "I used this clip" and "I used ninety seconds of it, all from the first six minutes".

Above the list, All · Repeat · OTHER · Unused narrows what you are looking at. The first three are about the uses – see Repeats and sections. The fourth is the other side of the coin.

The parts you never used

Unused lists the spans of the source that nothing points at – the gaps between the uses. Where each one starts, how long it is, and what share of the file it is. On a forty-minute interview that is usually most of it. Point at a span and the Source icon appears at the right-hand end, as on every other row: press it (or the row) to open the clip in the Source Monitor with its in and out set to that span.

A clip that is not cut into any sequence shows its never-used span straight away, under one line saying so – no scope buttons and no arrows, because there are no uses to narrow or step through.

Build a sequence of N spans turns the list into something you can scrub: it makes a subclip of each unused part and lays them end to end in a new sequence, named Unused spans · and the clip's name, then opens it. The sequence and its subclips go into a sub-bin named for the clip, _STRINGOUTS / Interview_A_STRINGOUT – with _STRINGOUTS inside the clip's bin, or at the top of the project if Settings ▸ Built sequences land says Top – so they never clutter the bin you are working from, and a second build from the same clip lands beside the first. It is 3 undo steps (the subclips, filing them, the sequence), plus one for each bin it has to make: 2 the very first time, 1 for a clip it has not built from before. It never touches the file.

Cut one of those subclips into your edit and its span stops being never used. The coverage bar, the never-used spans and the totals count every use of the clip's own subclips and of any other import of the same file – except a use inside a _STRINGOUTS sequence, so building the spans sequence never closes the spans it shows you. With Settings ▸ Put used clips back automatically on, that subclip also moves out of _STRINGOUTS and into the bin its master clip is in (see Putting it back).

• Click a row to open that clip in the Source Monitor marked to that span – the clip's in and out points are set to the unused stretch, ready to drag straight into a timeline. No modifier, and nothing to remember.
• That writes to the project: it is one undo step, Premiere's Cmd+Z takes it back, and the status line says which span was marked.

Every gap is listed, however short. On a heavily cut clip that means a lot of very small ones; the feature is for long masters and interviews, where the answer is measured in minutes.

The colour label swatches in the bar at the foot of the panel label the selected clip in one press. See Colour labels.

Clips you select in the timeline

The question this answers is the one you ask mid-edit. You are watching a cut, something looks familiar, and you want to know where else it is – without stopping, finding the clip in the Project panel, and clicking it there. Press Timeline and the sequence asks for you.

By default Trace+ answers about whatever you click in the Project panel. Press the Timeline icon in the toolbar – the switch just left of Filters, which lights purple while it is on – and it answers about clips you click in a sequence as well. Not instead: both keep working, and whichever you touched last is the one on screen.

It is off until you press it, it remembers the setting, and pressing it reads whatever is selected on the timeline right away rather than waiting for your next click.

• Select one clip in any sequence and the panel shows every other place that source is used – including the sequences you are not looking at.
• Selecting several clips of the same file is the same question, so the panel answers it. Selecting a mixture is not a question it can answer – it shows one clip's uses – so it keeps showing what you had.
• Clicking away on the timeline does not blank the panel.

Trace+ only. The free panel follows the Project panel and nothing else, which is part of what makes it a panel with nothing to set up.

One sequence

Select a sequence – or simply have one open with nothing else selected – and Trace+ lists every clip inside it, ranked by how many times it is used, with the total screen time beside each one.

• Click a row to expand it in place and see every individual use with its timecode. Several can be open at once, so comparing two clips is just reading.
• Only reused hides everything used exactly once.
• Opening one row closes the last, so a narrow dock stays readable. Cmd/Ctrl-click a clip name to keep more than one open at a time. There used to be a One clip · Multiple clips button here; the gesture replaced it, and the panel says so in the status line the first time you open a second row.

This is the view for "what am I leaning on too hard?" – the shot you have cut back to eleven times without noticing sits at the top of the list.

A whole bin

Select a bin in the Project panel and Trace+ splits it against the cut you have open: in this cut and not in this cut, as 2 big counts. A bin with folders inside lists the folders with their counts; press one to open it.

• Build a stringout lays every clip on the list you have open end to end in a new sequence and opens it. From not in this cut it is everything left to try; from in this cut it is the selects the cut already uses. The sequence is named for the list and the bin it came from, and it goes into a sub-bin named for that bin, _STRINGOUTS / Interviews_STRINGOUT, with _STRINGOUTS inside that bin – or at the top of the project, if Settings ▸ Built sequences land says Top or you selected more than one bin (then the sub-bin is named for the first one). Only the sequence goes there – the clips stay where they are. It is one step you can undo, plus one for each bin it has to make: 2 the very first time, 1 for a new bin.
• The new sequence is a cut like any other, so the sequence view takes over: the tick box in its column headings selects every clip in it, the colour chip labels them all, and the marker button puts a marker across every use. See Colour labels and Markers.
• The Media filter (All, Video, Audio, Stills) works in a bin too, and can be pinned there like anywhere else.

The whole project

Press Project – the clapper-board button – with nothing selected. Trace+ walks every bin, measures every media file, and gives you the lot.

The switch above the list flips between Used and Not used. Used is the default because it is the larger and less alarming half. Uses inside a _STRINGOUTS sequence do not count, so a file you have only laid out in a stringout is on the Not used side, tagged STRINGOUT ONLY. In a clip's own list of uses, Hide old folds stringouts away with the old sequences.

Each row's count says how many times the file is used. Point at the count to hear how many sequences that is; with Detail on Detailed it is also on the bin line under the name. On a narrow dock the type tag becomes a small Video, Audio or Stills icon so the names keep their room.

The filters

Every section has its own tick box because the sections answer different questions: somebody labelling the duplicates does not want the unused rows ticked as well.

What counts as unused

This is the number the whole panel rests on, so it is worth knowing exactly what it means.

A media file is unused when no project item pointing at it is on any timeline. Not per import – per file. Import the same interview twice and it is one row; if either copy is cut into a sequence, the file is used.

Three sections under the list exist to keep that number honest, and they are the difference between a tool you can act on and a list you have to double-check:

How long it all is

Beside Project status is the length of every media file in the project, used or not. Each half of the switch shows its own length under the file count, the list's heading shows the length of what is listed, and every row shows its file's length beside its bin. Lengths are read once per set of media, like the sizes, so a re-scan that changes nothing costs nothing.

How much disk space it would free

Under the list, Trace+ reports what the unused media comes to on disk – and draws the whole project as two bars: how much of the weight is dead, and what the weight actually is (video, audio, stills, other).

It is bytes, not file counts. Sixty unused stills and one unused ProRes master are the same row count and a thousand times apart on disk.

Measuring is the slowest thing the panel does – one filesystem call per distinct media file – so the list is drawn first and the weight lands a moment later. The sizes are then cached and only re-measured when the set of media files actually changes. The ☰ > Re-scan project item always re-measures: it is the "I do not believe you" button, and a cache is what it exists to overrule.

Duplicates and empty bins

Two more questions come free off the same walk, and both are end-of-job tidying:

• Duplicate imports – the same file sitting in the project two or three times over. Each row says how many spare copies there are and what happens to them – 1 spare · can go, or in use, or other part when a copy covers a different part of the file. Point at it for the whole sentence. Usually harmless, occasionally the reason two editors' versions disagree.
• Empty bins – and "empty" means the whole subtree, not just childless. A bin holding four bins that are themselves empty is the emptiest thing in the project, and it is reported as one row rather than making you delete the leaves four times over.

The spare imports can go. Under the duplicates list is a button reading Remove N spare copies: it removes the project items that point at a file another item already points at. The file on your disk is never touched, every media file always keeps at least one item, and it is one undo step for the lot.

Or file them away. Tick rows in Duplicate imports and Move files them into _DUPLICATE IMPORTS rather than _UNUSED, the way the Offline list files into _OFFLINE. Only files nothing uses can move – the spare copies of a file that is in your cut are what Remove N spare copies is for – and Put back brings them home like anything else Trace+ filed.

What about Premiere's own Consolidate Duplicates? It is a different operation: it repoints sequence clips at one master. If your duplicates are unused imports – the usual case after an ingest runs twice – it has nothing to repoint. It also gives you no preview, no count and no explanation when it declines.

Empty bins can be removed. Tick the ones you want gone and press Delete empty bins. It is one undo step for the lot, and there is nothing inside them to lose – that is what "empty" means here.

Offline media

The Offline chip is not a relink tool, and that is deliberate – Premiere's own Link Media dialog does that job properly and a worse copy of a built-in belongs in no product.

What it is for is the question Link Media cannot answer: which of the offline files actually matter. That dialog lists everything that is offline in one flat list with no idea what is in your cut. Press Offline and then Used and Trace+ tells you the three that are in the edit; press Not used and it tells you the twelve that are sitting in bins nobody is waiting for.

That turns a fifteen-file relink hunt into a three-file one. Export CSV gives you the paths and the sequences to send to whoever has the drive.

Colour labels

Trace+ both shows the label Premiere has given each item and lets you set one.

Reading them

Every row carries a coloured bar beside its name – the same label the Project panel draws in its own colour column. It is a readout, not a control: pressing it does nothing, because the swatch bar is the one way to change a label. It is always on: the setting that hid it was removed in October 2026.

Setting them

The swatch bar sits at the foot of the panel. In the project view it labels everything ticked; with a clip selected it labels that clip. Fifteen colours, read from Premiere's own list at run time.

Where to look: the Project panel's Label column first – that is the one place the change always shows. Not the panel's own list, which redraws from the label you just set and so can only ever agree with itself. Trace+ reads the label back from Premiere after setting it, and says so in the status line if the host kept something else.

Labelling fifteen files is one undo step, not fifteen. It replaces whatever label those items had, and the status line says so.

Only the cut you have open

A clip cut into four versions of the same film answers "where is this used" with four groups, and three of them are about a timeline you do not have open. Active sequence only narrows the list to the sequence in front of you, and the label counts what it hid.

Filtering the list

Ticking files one at a time is fine for five and useless for five hundred – which is the size of project this panel exists for. So you narrow the list first, then act on what is left.

You choose which filters sit on the panel. In Filters, the pin beside a filter puts it above the list; every filter you have pinned is listed under Panel, where its struck-through pin turns yellow when you point at it and one press unpins it. Search pins the same way, with the pin beside its heading: pinned, the search box sits above the list in the Project view, the Active cut view and a bin.

Above the list, each chip carrying its own live count:

• Used / Not used – the two halves of the question
• All · Video · Audio · Stills – by media type, read from the file itself
• Used 2+ – cut in twice or more, counting instances rather than sequences. It cycles: 2+ → 3+ → 5+ → off, skipping any step that would empty the list
• Offline – the list a relink session starts from
• Duplicate imports – files more than one project item points at
• Archived only – used, but only in cuts you have archived

They compose. Every one of them narrows what is already on screen rather than replacing it, so "offline stills that are also duplicated" is one press each – no menu of combinations, and no combination somebody forgot to write.

The four media-type chips work in the open sequence too, not just across the whole project: "which stills are in this cut" is the same question as "which stills are in this project", asked of a smaller list.

Searching by name

Above the chips there is a search box. Type part of a name and the list narrows to the rows that carry it – in All media and inside a sequence both. Matching is case-insensitive and it is a plain "contains", not a fuzzy guess: type interview and you get every name with interview in it, and nothing else.

It searches the clip's name – the name on the row, and the names of the project items behind it. That second half matters more than it sounds: a row in All media is one media file, while Premiere's own Project panel lists project items, so the name you read there and type in here can be CLIP_2 copy.mov while the row says CLIP_2.mov. Both find it.

Nothing else is matched – not the bin, not the sequence. What you can see is what is being matched, so a row that appears is always a row you can explain.

The search sits on top of the chips rather than replacing them, like every other filter here: Not used + Stills + drone is three presses and a word.

Clear it with the ✕, or press Escape while the box has focus. The term survives a re-scan and a change of view, the same way the chips do – "show me the interview rushes" is a question about the footage, not about which list happens to be up.

Pinning the chips you use

Most of the time you are reading the list rather than narrowing it, so only the filters you pin sit above it – to begin with, just the Media chips and Used 2+. Every filter in the Filters menu has a pin beside it: unpin one and it leaves the panel but stays in the menu, pin it again and it comes back.

The summary block – the used and not used totals, the chips and the media type bar – folds away separately, in Settings ▸ Display ▸ Summary + bars, because keeping the filters while folding the summary is a real thing to want on a long list of unused media.

Hiding rows you have dealt with

Filters answer “show me this kind of thing”. Working through a long unused list is the other job: you have looked at a row, decided about it, and you never want to see it again this afternoon.

The eye is off until you want it: open Filters and pin Show / hide eye (under Rows), and every row in every view carries a small eye beside its tick box. Unpin it again from Panel in the same menu. Press a row's eye and the row leaves the list. Tick several rows first and pressing any ticked row's eye hides all of them — the tooltip changes to say so before you press, because a control that quietly does six things while saying “this row” is a surprise you cannot undo by pressing it again.

Repeats and sections

“Nine uses” and “nine different bits of footage” are not the same sentence. Nine uses of one three-second cutaway and nine moments of an interview are opposite facts about a job, and the use count alone cannot tell them apart.

So when they differ, the used pane says both: 9 over 4 sections · 1m 20s. Four sections means four distinct stretches of the source were used; the other five uses are repeats of footage already counted.

And every use of a clip that is used more than once carries a badge saying which kind it is:

• REPEAT – this footage, again. The same stretch of the source, laid down a second time.
• OTHER – the same clip, a different part of it.
• neither – this clip is used once.

Seven uses of one heartbeat effect might be seven different hits, or the same one-and-a-half seconds seven times, and those are opposite facts about a sound effect. Now the row says which.

Seeing one half of them

Above the list there is one more control: press it and it cycles Show repeats → Show other parts → Show all, each carrying the number you would get. It appears only when there are both kinds to separate – a clip whose uses are all repeats has nothing to narrow to.

Retimed uses

A use that does not play at normal speed says so on its row: an amber tag with the speed (50%, 200%), or REV when it plays backwards. Retimed, beside Repeat and Other, narrows the list to just those uses, with its count on the chip.

• It is the check before a delivery or a re-conform: every slowed, sped-up or reversed use of a clip, across every cut, in one list.
• In the Active cut view each clip's row carries the tag too: the speed when every use of it plays at that speed, or 1 at 50% when only some do. The Retimed filter there lists only those clips.
• The speed Trace+ reads is the clip's own Speed/Duration setting. Speed keyframed with time remapping is not shown yet.

What each row is

A filename cannot tell you what a thing is. A001_C014_0429R8 is a video, a still, or a whole nested sequence depending on a project nobody can see from the name.

So every row carries a label: VIDEO, AUDIO, STILL, NEST – in the same colours the disk-space breakdown uses, so cyan means video in both places rather than in one.

Two of them are warnings rather than descriptions. MULTICAM and MERGED mark the containers nothing in Premiere's API can see inside: a file used only through one of them looks unused to any tool, including this one. Trace+ says so on the row rather than reporting a number that is too low and letting you archive the interview audio.

Settings ▸ Panel ▸ Clip tags turns them off. On a narrow dock the tag and the filename compete for the same forty characters, which is why it is a switch. While they are hidden, the Filters button counts it, so the list never changes without saying why.

Markers

The marker button in the title row – the flag shape – drops a marker over every use on screen. Unlike a selection, a marker survives you clicking somewhere else: it is the persistent version of "highlight every use".

Tick some rows first and it marks only those. The tick boxes are one selection, used by everything: the timeline selection, Move, Put back and the marker button. With nothing ticked the button still marks every use on screen, which is the quick gesture – open a clip, press the flag. Removing markers ignores the ticks on purpose: it is the tidy-up, so it clears every Trace · marker in the view and never touches one you wrote yourself.

What it marks depends on where you are:

Set a colour in ☰ > Settings > Colours > Marker colour and each sequence costs a second step, because a marker does not exist until its transaction has committed and its colour has to be set afterwards. On the default – Premiere's own colour – you pay nothing for a feature you did not ask for. Pressing the button twice never repaints the first run's markers.

Move to a bin

Tick the rows you want out of your way and press the Move button. It names the count, the destination and the undo cost before you press it – Move 47 to _OFFLINE – so there is nothing to confirm afterwards.

The bin is named after the filter that found the rows. With Offline on it reads _OFFLINE; otherwise it is whatever ☰ > Settings calls the archive, _UNUSED by default. Nothing to type, and the name always describes what is in it.

To send them somewhere else, press the caret beside the button. It lists the filter’s own bin, the archive from Settings, bins Trace+ has filed into before, and every top-level bin already in your project – then New bin… at the foot, which opens a name box above the list. Enter accepts it, Esc cancels.

The caret is a separate control from the button on purpose: one target that sometimes files forty clips and sometimes opens a menu is a mis-click waiting to happen.

• It works on any list, not just Not used. Offline media is very often still in the cut, so filing it away is exactly the case a "not used only" button could never handle.
• Nothing is deleted, ever, and nothing is hidden from Premiere. A move is a move: the files stay in the project, in a bin, and Cmd/Ctrl-Z takes it back.
• Put back sees every bin Trace+ has filed into, not just the one in Settings. Whatever the panel files, the panel can return.

Two shapes, in ☰ > Settings:

You can rename the bin from _UNUSED to anything you like in the same place.

Items filed into the unused bin get a tan colour label so they are obvious in the Project panel. Items filed into _OFFLINE, _DUPLICATE IMPORTS or a bin you chose keep the label they had. Nothing is copied, nothing leaves the project, and nothing is deleted – Cmd/Ctrl-Z undoes it like any other edit.

Putting it back

The day one of those clips gets cut back into a sequence, your project says "archived" about footage that is on air. Trace+ notices.

In the project view, the archived files appear with a Used again badge when the index finds them back on a timeline. Tick what you want and press Put back.

Relinked files go back too

Files you move into _OFFLINE – from the Offline chip – go back to the bin they came from once you relink them in Premiere. Trace+ notices on its next scan (within a couple of minutes, or straight away if you press Re-scan or open the Project view). Settings ▸ Put relinked files back automatically is on by default: it only undoes a move whose reason has gone, and only for files Trace+ filed itself. Turn it off and they wait in _OFFLINE until you press Put back. _OFFLINE only ever takes offline files, so nothing online can be sent there and bounced straight back.

Or let it happen on its own

Turn on Settings ▸ Put used clips back automatically and it does the same thing without the press: when a clip in the archive turns up on a timeline again, it goes straight back to the bin it came from.

• It is off by default, and that is deliberate. It second-guesses your edit, and a panel that rearranges a Project panel you did not ask it to rearrange is one you stop trusting. Turning it on is a choice you make once.
• It only ever moves what Trace+ filed. Same contract as the button – nothing outside _UNUSED is touched, ever.
• It runs whatever view you are in. It used to need All media open, which made it useless for the moment it exists for – pulling an archived clip back into a cut is something you do while looking at the cut. It now watches in the background from any view and files the clip the moment the index sees it back on a timeline.
• It learns what is in the archive once per session. Turning the setting on does not act on what is already filed until Trace+ has read the archive once, which happens the first time it looks; after that every check is free.
• An item that will not move is left alone and not retried, and the status line says how many. A tidy-up that keeps failing quietly is worse than one that does not run.
• Used span subclips go home too. A subclip made by Build a sequence of N spans lives in _STRINGOUTS until you cut it into a real sequence. Then it moves into the bin its master clip is in – one undo step, its colour label left as it was, and the clip's _STRINGOUT bin stays, because the spans sequence is still in it. If the master is in more than one bin, or nowhere outside _STRINGOUTS, Trace+ cannot know which bin you mean, so it leaves the subclip where it is and the scan report lists it.

• Each item returns to the bin it came from – read out of the archive path itself. Nothing is remembered anywhere, which is why it still works on another machine, in another session, after somebody has dragged things around by hand.
• If the original bin was deleted while the media sat in the archive, it is rebuilt.
• Anything filed flat, or that lived at the top level to begin with, goes back to the top level. Those two are indistinguishable from here, and the panel says how many.
• The empty bins go with it. Filing away creates bins; putting everything back used to leave them standing, empty, mirroring a structure that now existed twice. They are cleaned up – but only the ones that are genuinely empty, subtree and all.

Selecting and the Source Monitor

Everything the free panel does. Tick the box in a sequence's heading and every use in it becomes a real Premiere selection at the same moment – nudge them, delete them, apply an effect. Shift-click or double-click any use to open it in the Source Monitor with that use set as in and out.

Copying and exporting

☰ > Copy list puts what is on screen on the clipboard as plain text – in the clip view or the Active cut view, filters and all. It is what the list is showing, not what it could show, so a filtered list copies filtered.

☰ > Export CSV is the other half of that: a file a spreadsheet opens without anybody repairing it first. Same rule – it exports what is on screen – and what you get depends on the view you are in, because the three views answer three questions:

If Premiere cannot open a save dialog, the CSV goes to the clipboard instead and the status line says that is what happened – never a file you then cannot find.

How much to show

☰ > Settings > Detail has two levels, and they change how tight the rows are as well as how much each one says.

Set it to Clean on a narrow dock and Detailed when you are actually investigating something. It is one press either way.

Every setting

☰ > Settings. The window sizes itself to what is in it, and everything is saved for next time, the column sort and Summary + bars included. Reset to defaults, at the foot of the window, puts every preference back as it was on first install – your licence, the tours you have seen and the bins Trace+ has filed into are kept. Point at any setting, or a group heading, and the strip along the bottom says what it does – the explanations live in one place instead of appearing as a tooltip over the control you are trying to read. The Panel tab shows a clip row and one of its uses as they will look in the list, and it changes as you change the settings above it.

Text size is not in Settings. It is a slider at the right-hand end of the status strip along the bottom of the panel – Aa at each end, four steps. Click anywhere on the rail, or focus it and use the arrow keys; the list holds its place while the size changes, so you do not lose where you were. A panel docked down the side of a 4K display draws 11px labels at about five millimetres, and this one is read all day.

Source, on every row

Point at any row in the Project, clip or sequence view and the Source icon (a small monitor) appears at its far end. Nothing on the row moves to make room: the space is always there. It opens the clip in the Source Monitor, and on a clip row in a sequence, or on a single use, it opens at that use. Shift-click does the same from anywhere on the row, and Alt-click copies the clip's name for the Project panel's Find box. Settings ▸ Display ▸ Hover tips turns the tips off.

Sorting. The Name, Type and Uses headings over the Active cut and Project lists sort by that column; click the same heading again to reverse it. The arrow shows which one is in use, and each list remembers its sort next time. Duplicate imports sorts the same way, with Spare in place of Uses.

Getting back. Click a row and Trace+ jumps to the sequence that uses it most. Project status › appears before the name there, and one press takes you back.

Every gesture

Shift and double-click do the same thing deliberately, so the Source Monitor is reachable whichever one you reach for.

Docking

Trace+ drops columns as it narrows rather than squashing them.

Below roughly 180px wide there is nothing left to give up. If you live in a narrow dock, set Detail to Clean.

Updates and About

Trace+ checks once a day whether a newer version exists and shows a small notice in the panel if so. ☰ > Help & licence… asks every time it opens and says the answer under the version number: You're up to date, a newer version you can press to download, or Couldn't check for updates if the update server could not be reached. Check for updates at the bottom of that window asks again and shows the answer in its place.

☰ > Help & licence… shows the version you are running – the first thing to quote if you report a problem – along with your licence and a link back to this site.

☰ > Tour plays the tour for the view you are in. There are 2: one for the Active cut, which runs the first time you open the panel, and one for the Project view, which runs the first time you open that.

The scan report

☰ > Scan report prints exactly what the panel did: how many sequences and track items it read, how long the index took, how many media files it measured and by which route, how many times it has rebuilt, and anything that went wrong along the way.

It has its own bar with Copy and Hide on it, and ☰ > Copy scan report does the same thing from the menu – which is there so that copying a support report never depends on one row of the panel drawing.

Opening it does not take your clipboard. It used to, and a diagnostic is exactly the thing you open in the middle of doing something else.

If you report a problem, send this. It answers in one paste the questions that otherwise take four emails.

Release history

What Trace+ can't do

Not oversights. Premiere's plugin API genuinely does not offer these, and no plugin can do them.

FAQ

Do I need Trace as well?

No. Trace+ contains everything Trace does. Having both installed is fine and they do not interfere, but one panel is enough.

Is it safe to run on a job that is on air?

Reading is always safe – it opens nothing and changes nothing. These are the things that write to your project, and only when you press them:

• colour labels and markers
• Move to _UNUSED and Put back (and automatic put-back, which is off until you switch it on)
• removing spare copies of a file imported twice, and removing empty bins
• the sequences it builds: stringouts and the unused parts of a clip, and the _STRINGOUTS bin they go into

Every one is an ordinary Premiere edit that Cmd/Ctrl-Z undoes, and none of them touches a file on your disk.

Why is the first scan slow?

It reads every track item in every sequence, then walks every bin, then measures every media file on disk. On a 500-clip project that is a few seconds; on a network volume the measuring is the slow part. After that it re-uses what it has and only re-measures when the media actually changes.

It says a clip is unused and I am sure it is in the cut

Four things do this, in order of likelihood – see Troubleshooting.

Can I change the archive bin's name?

Yes, in ☰ > Settings. Do it before you file anything: rename it afterwards and Put back can no longer find what you archived.

Does it work with Productions?

It reads the project that is open. It cannot see the other projects in a Production, because the API cannot reach a project that is not open.

What happens if I remove the licence from a computer?

Nothing you have already done is affected – labels, markers and archived bins are ordinary parts of your project and belong to you. The panel returns to its locked state until a key is activated again. Trace+ is a one-time purchase: the licence does not expire, and one licence covers 2 computers, or 10 with Trace+ Studio.

Is there a licence for a team?

Yes – Trace+ Studio: one key for 10 machines. Every editor activates the same key, and Remove frees a seat when someone leaves or changes computer. Need more than 10? Get in touch.

Troubleshooting

Double-clicking the .ccx did nothing, or said “Creative Cloud cannot open files of this type”

Creative Cloud Desktop has to be installed and signed in. Open it first, then double-click the file again. That fixes most cases.

Still not working? Your Mac or PC has lost track of which Adobe app opens .ccx files. Nothing is wrong with the file. Install it with Adobe’s own plugin installer instead, the same one Creative Cloud uses behind the scenes. Quit Premiere first.

Mac: open Terminal (Applications > Utilities), paste this, type a space, then drag TracePlus.ccx into the Terminal window and press Return:

Windows: open Command Prompt (not PowerShell), paste this, type a space, then drag TracePlus.ccx into the window and press Enter:

Dragging the file in types its exact location for you, wherever it was saved. When it finishes, restart Premiere and look under Window > UXP Plugins. Still stuck? Email me and I will sort it with you.

Trace+ isn't in the Window menu

• Premiere must be 25.6.0 or newer. Check About Premiere Pro.
• Restart Premiere after installing – UXP plugins are only read at launch.
• Look under Window > UXP Plugins, not Extensions. That submenu is for the older CEP kind.

It says a clip is unused and I am sure it is in the cut

• The uses are in archived sequences. Look under Used only in archived sequences, and press All cuts in the clip view.
• It is a different import of the same file. Check Imported more than once – Trace+ counts by file, but two files with the same name are two files.
• It is a merged or multicam clip. Trace+ flags this under the totals.
• The sequence has never been opened in this session. Press ☰ > Re-scan project.

The weight says "unmeasured" for a lot of files

Either the volume is offline, or Premiere has not been granted access to it. The scan report lists which route the panel used to reach the files and what each one did – that is the fastest way to tell the two apart.

I pressed a colour and nothing changed

Look at the Project panel's Label column, not the timeline. If the clip is already cut into a sequence and somebody set that instance's colour by hand, the override wins and no plugin can change it.

Move to _UNUSED refused some of my rows

Their media is in use somewhere – that refusal is the point. The status line says how many were refused. If you disagree, the row will be in Not placed, but their media is used.

The numbers look out of date

Trace+ re-scans on its own as you edit, but ☰ > Re-scan project forces it – and re-measures the media, which the automatic scan deliberately does not.

The panel is squashed or the buttons overlap

Drag the dock wider or taller, and set Detail to Clean. Below roughly 180px wide there is nothing left to give up.

Privacy

Trace+ asks for full filesystem access. That is a bigger ask than the free panel makes, and it deserves a plain answer.

It is for one thing: reading how big your media files are, so the panel can tell you what your unused media weighs. It reads file sizes. It does not read file contents, and it never uploads anything.

What leaves your machine, ever:

• Licence activation – your key and a machine identifier, to the licence server, so seats can be counted. Once, at activation, and again if you press Remove.
• The update check – a request for the current version number, once a day.

Nothing else. No project names, no file paths, no media, no analytics. The scan report is the one place your file paths appear, and it is something you press and paste yourself.

Support

Email hello@nkcourses.co.uk. Include the version from ☰ > Help & licence…, say what you selected and what you expected – and paste the scan report. That is the fastest possible bug report and it usually answers the question on its own.