Lost hard drive space to "other"?

I see someone else had a similar question, and I've tried to follow some of the steps that person took, but to no avail! Briefly, something is eating hard drive space on my work macbook, and I can't figure out what, nor how to get the space back. I edit film of our library program and also sound files for our local history collection, so I do use quite a bit of space. About once a week, I do a time machine backup, and also move finished projects to the external drive. This has always given me enough room to work - until now. I had more than 30 gigs left on my drive before importing the latest 45 minute movie. Now I have less than 8. I'm not sure I've enough room left even to burn it to DVD before offloading the raw footage. Things I noticed:
1.)I don't know if this is a Mavericks thing, but, when I was deleting files from the macbook hard drive, they didn't seem to be in the trash. The command to empty the trash was greyed out.
2.)I looked at the previous thread (the poster who had 300 gigs missing). Like him, I have mystery files in storage - namely, 49 gigs in "other". My life would be a lot simpler if I could get that space back!
What I've done so far: Run OmniDiskSweeper and thrown out some older movies and music that should now be on the external drive.
Opened the Disk utility and repaired permissions and checked the drive. All okay.
Tried to run the daily, weekly, and monthly scripts in Terminal.
As per the previous thread, tried turning off Time Machine, turning it on again, backing up again, and turning it off.
All this did nothing for me. I am still missing close to 50 gigs of space - space I could really use.
OmniDiskSweeper tells me that I have used 73.4 G out of 120. "Get Info" tells me that I've used closer to 113 out of 120. "About This Mac" tells me that I have 49 G in "Other", whatever and wherever that is. How can I get rid of these "other" files and happily edit my films? And how can I keep this from happening again?
Thanks very much in advance!
Mary

About “Other”:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202867
Go step by step and test.
1. Start up in Safe Mode.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11212
2. Empty Trash.
   http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13806
3. Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Hold the option key down and click "Go" menu in the Finder menu bar.
    Select "Library" from the dropdown.
    Library > Mail > V2 > Mailboxes
    Delete "Recovered Messages", if any.
    Empty Trash. Restart.
4. Delete old iOS Devices Backup.
    iTunes > Preferences > Devices
    Highlight the old Backups , press “Delete Backup” and then “OK”.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4946?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
5. Re-index Macintosh HD.
   Do this twice. This re-indexing will take hours to produce reliable stats in Storage/ About this Mac.
   System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
   http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409

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(110331)

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