Same problem!!! This was so annoying. I had to go back to the old version. But in one project I already made so much progress that i had to finish it in this new stupid update. The solution i found is to export all the png's in tiffs keeping transparency and then in Premiere "replace footage." Even the option replace footage is not working properly so you have to replace the footage "twice" for every png, because the first time when you replace clicking "okay", it seems to get freeze and nothing happens so you have to select the .png and replace again and the second time it gets replaced by the tiff... Of course replacing more than 100 pngs was terrible. No brownie points for premiere... very bad issue guys... ... View more

Thank you, Yes, please, tell the team. I'm pretty sure they can program it and come up with an option in the software like "consolidate duplicate master clips" or something like this, and automatize the whole process i did manually... the result would be a new project where there are no duplicate clips automatically and faster than doing one by one. Thank you. ... View more

I FOUND A SOLUTION! It worked for me at least. It takes a bit of time but for projects that are huge like mine, I think it's worth to spend some hours "debugging". I used the last version of premiere cc 2018. Here it is how i did it: 1) Make sure that in the original project with dup master clips you have the “Write XMP ID to files on import” activated. 2) Create a new project (I didn’t close the original one given that 2018allows you to have several projects open). 3) Make sure the “Write XMP ID to files on import” option is activated in the new project. 4) Open Media Browser. 5) Make sure that in the media browser settings you have the option “Allow Duplicate Media During Project Import” Off, unchecked, i mean, NOT selected! 6) Browse for the original project in your hard drive using Media Browser. 7) Drag the sequence from the original project to the root of the new empty (use media browser. If you drag it from the original project opened, didn't work for me). It will create the folder structure where the master clips are. 8) Drag the other sequence (the one your other editor prepared and used to point to the dup master clips) to the root of the new project. Voilà! Problem solved. No duplicate master clips. 9) Repeat the operation. You can drag several sequences at a time, but if you drag a lot, premiere wouldn't import anything. You’ll notice that some times creates the same folder structure, and it seems that is duplicating the clips, but if you go inside the bins, you’ll see that it’s only duplicating the folder structure and inside the bins there are the clips that were not included when you dragged the first sequence. After that it’s a matter of just organizing the project a little bit. I had 90 days of shooting, then synced sequences with plural eyes so when i imported them it duplicated the clips. Then also worked with a second editor making cuts of some of the sequences. When i imported those, it duplicated the footage again. So in some cases I had 3 master clips and opening the project and loading clips would take me forever. It took me a couple of hours to “re-do” the project, importing from media browser and organizing it again. But in my case was worth it. Hope this helped.   ... View more