Hi Hilary,
I'm not an expert on this so I'll just contribute until somebody more knowledgable chimes in.
If you want to totally dispense with footage from your library/desktop, I know that dragging them down to the bottom of the interface deletes them from the system. This does not happen straight away (you can undo, etc.), but when you shut down and start Smoke up again, the system's housekeeping cycle deletes this footage and so frees up space.
I didn't really think about this until a few weeks into using it and then it really freed up my use of Smoke a little more. Without an external raid (I'm just about to purchase a Promise Pegasus), I was using the internal 1tb HD and so I was a little conservative with creating clips between the modules as I didn't really know how to get rid of them (I was even
wrongly deleting dpx files manually from the 'managed' folder to free space!!).
Anyway perhaps this method of
dragging-down deleting is not what you are looking for however (more of a scratch method for temporary footage?) and you want to to keep the metadata info while deleting the underlying footage? This I do not know but I know there is also a method for doing this. I think it involves some entries in the library whereby you either delete/disconnect the footage/file (while keeping the references) or replace it with proxies? I think there was a tutorial by Grant Kay on it, that should be somewhere in his newly organised list of tutorials at the top of the page...
Anyway I'm sure somebody will chime in with a fuller picture later...
Cheers
Tony
HP Z840, 80GB Ram, Quadro M6000x24GB