Consolidate Duplicates not working sometimes

[KazuTa]

I am Assistant Editing on a docuseries that has tens of thousands of clips from several years of shooting, archival, etc., with sequences in various projects. I am trying to create a master project that has all the sequences from the various projects in it.

I have been reorganizing the source clips to mirror the folder structure in Finder then using Consolidate Duplicates so there is ideally only one source clip per piece of media. 

There are a handful of source clips that won't consolidate. I've tried detaching proxies, which works sometimes, but there are a few that are stubbornly refusing to consolidate.

I have noticed that one source clip has video & audio being used in sequences, while the duplicate source clip only has video being used in a sequence. I tried putting the second clip into a sequence so it would also have video + audio being used, but that didn't do the trick.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello @KazuTa,

Are you setting this up as a new Production from a non-Production workflow? Let us know what the worflow has been in the past. I hope we can help you.

Thanks,
Kevin

[KazuTa]

We're setting it up as a non-Production workflow.

[R Neil Haugen]

Ahh. That many assets, probably a fair number of sequences and such ... working in the old stand-alone project process is tough.

Vastly easier to do stuff like this from project to project within a Production. As that simply avoids the whole duplicate assets issue in toto. Best wishes, this can take fiddling.

For that one you mentioned last, you might need to find every use of that duped clip, then replace with on the sequence with the right clip, close, and on relaunch dump all cache and preview and such files. Might work.

[KazuTa]

With Productions, is there a way to bring in sequences from an older project without creating duplicate source clips? We tried creating a Production, creating a project within it called "FOOTAGE", importing all the footage into that project, creating a second project called "SEQUENCES", then dragging a sequence from an older project into it, but that brought all the source clips used in that sequence into the "SEQUENCES" project.

One drawback I've seen with Productions is that the Video and Audio Usage metadata fields no longer work.

[R Neil Haugen]

There have to be metadata references within the Production. So you either import things into the Production, or you can add the external project to the production.

Once in the 'system', then use of the assets in any other project in the production does not create duplicates. So you have perhaps a folder tree for assets, with maybe several projects there for different types of assets, or however you organize them.

And grab from any of those to whatever projects you have sequences in.

There are some things about tracking original location of the asset (match frame stuff) that at times are not supported, but in general, it is so vastly superior to stand-alone workflows for larger projects. Heavily used.

Go to the YouTube and search for Karl Soule's vids on using Productions. Knows his stuff, as he was in on the design of it. He's one of their main links to large production facilities.

[KazuTa]

Karl Soule's YouTube videos on Productions was extremely helpful! Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qEL74_70_k&list=PLQffqHOsF2KZk6kWPWqYJ3mAdoTAJp3w5&index=1