How do I get around the fact that I recorded too much audio?

Question

Okay, so I got this new Sony PMW 200 camera and finally went high def for the first time. Turns out the camera records EIGHT channels of audio! I recorded a couple of programs with it and am now trying to get the HDCAM footage into Premiere Pro 5 (I'll have 6 in a couple of days.) Here's what I did. I took the files (HDCAM 50) and pulled them off the portable hard drive I used on site and copied them to a CLIPS file on my Raid drive. I am now using the media browser to bring the clips into my project. The problem is that the audio is so huge that I think it has been the cause of my system crashing a few times. I have about 160 clips. Am I better off just taking it slow and doing a few clips at a time or do I find some conversion software (help!) that will get rid of all that audio.
I have to have a show done in a few days and am sort of freaking out. I am new to all this. I realized I was recording alor of audio, but this all came down real fast and figured I could fix it in post, not taking into account the large file sizes due to all that audio. I literally had the camera one day and was shooting with it a couple of days later.
Any help would be extremely appreciated. Oh and I have been saving the program over and over, but found at a certain point that the system just crashed soon after I turned it on. I'm running it on a dual quad core Xeon (PC) with 8 gigs of ram.

Answer 1

SimonHy, the PMW 200 does record  @ 4:2:2 - which is 50 MB/s. 
fullhead, 50 MB/s is 15 MB/s greater than 4:2:0 which is 35 MB/s.  That's really the only major difference over the EX1R.  4:2:2 and above is essential for much broadcast work and (arguably) green screen.  But for general work, 4:2:0 will produce extremely high quality output. 
Did you copy the entire folder structure verbatim from the camera to your hard drive?  It sounds as if you cherry-picked certain files and moved only those across.  The EX1R names the folder as BPAV.
Before dragging files into the timeline, identify which of the PMW's audio tracks you wish to use - then target ONLY those tracks.  When you insert the audio into the timeline, the unwanted audio tracks will be excluded - although, as SimonHy says, that's probably not where your problem lays.