P: Duplicate Clips when reimporting footages (Syncaila)

I've been working with syncaila now for a while. For the first tests I did, reimporting the xmls workd perfectly without duplicates. Then I started to have this issue which really bothered me. After reading through this thread, I think I understand what is happening and how to avoid it. Here is what works for me:
- Premiere will only duplicate the footage, when there were some effects or settings applied to the footage before exporting as xml (not in the timeline, but on the footage itself).

- At some point, either directly when exporting as XML in premiere or when exporting as synced XML in Syncaila, some settings applied to the raw footage are lost, leading to a discrepancy in the footage listed in the XMLs and in the existing premiere project. This will cause reimport of the footage, as it is not exactly the same!

How to avoid it:

In your footage bin, select all footage and go to interpret footage. Check if anything like color profile conversion is applied. Disable everything, keep the footage as raw as possible. Then reimport the synced XML and you should not have any duplicates. After that, you can interpret the footage as needed.

Hope it helps, at least this is what fixed it for me.

@Bruce Bullis Can you please provide a priority update on the bug status? Duplicate media issues are crippling our projects, and it's unacceptable that it's been over three months since the report. We need a comprehensive fix, not a patchwork solution. Don't leave us waiting with fixes buried under the hood – we deserve transparency and a timely resolution.

For reference, Premiere Pro 2022 works as expected in this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTDobD9u0TU

Relink is not worked for me, I need to save color label settings on the clips, and the correct bins in project. And thats why I can't open project in older versions Pr, cause labels reseted too.

This worked for me. I selected the newly imported files, made them offline and then relinked them and consolidated duplicate and it worked! Thank you!

Premiere's project files have a reference to the location on disc of all assets. And as there are times you need to be able to do different things with a file, that are seen as "source effects", it does allow duplicate references to a file, so each reference can have different things applied.

So there are duplicate references, but not duplicate files, as you probably already know. I just try to be clear on this because using the phrase "import files" sounds like it's actually copying the file somewhere, and for new users, this is incredibly confusing. As it doesn't do that. Just makes a reference.

So it doesn't affect files on disc at all to have multiple references in the Project file.

But it can be flipping unhandy for working within Premiere at times to have the duplicated file reference we don't need. And for that, it would be ever so nice if the devs got this sort of thing a bit more smoothly handled, no question there!

So yes, I would love it if they got the duplicates from using Syncalia or whatever cleaned up.

Same problem when import XML projects synced with PluralEyes or Syncaila.

Premiere ignores the disable option of not re importing duplicated media.

Also ignore "Consolidate duplicate media"

I don't know why they have that option if it doesn't work.

In past versions there were workarounds (as always in Premiere Pro, users have to figure out) when you import the XML in a new project, then import that project in the original, Premiere didn't import the already imported media, but now it seems it's gone.

Why is it important to fix this? In my case I have data management in Windows, so when I import a project, the path of the folders/bin are the same, so I have very well organized media in Premiere.

With this problem it imports and duplicates all the media in one bin,  so now you have two same files, but behaving like two different media.

We have not.

@IanB_360 @Bruce Bullis Have we confirmed that the problem comes from Premiere export into XML ?

Same here. 

xml round trip Issue in Premiere Pro
I'm working on a large multicam project and need to synchronize all clips according to timecode. I used Syncaila for synchronization and imported the resulting .xml file into Premiere Pro. However, Premiere Pro imported all clips again, duplicating the ones already imported, along with the synced timeline. The "Consolidate Duplicate Media" option didn't resolve the issue.

Steps Taken:
1. Imported 2 camera footages into separate bins in Premiere Pro.
2. Created a new sequence.
3. Placed Camera 1 footage in Track 1 and Camera 2 footage in Track 2.
4. Exported the sequence as an XML file (FCPX format).
5. Opened the XML file in Syncaila, synchronized the clips using metadata, and saved the synced sequence as a new XML file.
6. Imported the synced XML file into a new bin in Premiere Pro.

Issue:
Premiere Pro imports all clips again, duplicating existing ones, instead of linking to the already imported media, similar to how older versions of Premiere Pro handled imports.