Participating Frequently

Question

Consolidate duplicates does not work

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 30, 2021
15 replies
10586 views

I have big project with some dupes in it. So when I try to use "Edit > Consolidate Duplicates" it does nothing.

So I ended up cleaning all project to three clips that are linked to exact same raw footage, no proxies attached and I nothing else in project panel, just those three clips:

Still "Consolidate Duplicates" does nothing. Maybe I should look for some other places where Premiere thinks that those are different clips? Any ideas?

April_Tolliver8982

Participant

I’m using Premiere 26 and this feature does not work still. Thank you for posting this issue even 4 years ago.

I appreciate people sharing their work arounds, but we don’t have time for it. Everyday I have tight deadlines, and I would expect after years of a flawed feature, Premiere either just scrap it or find a solution. As customers it shouldn’t have to fall on us to find complicated work arounds to features that are suppose to make our workflows more efficient. I do hope one day Adobe reads these complaints and take us more seriously. We pay good money and a lot of time FIXING their the flaws of their product. TIME IS MONEY and we’re wasting both on problems like this.

T

ThibaultD

Inspiring

I spend a couple of hours today to figure a solution that work in my case.

I needed to consolidate my clips because an imported XML created/duplicated each clip in two parts : one with video (the original clip) and one with audio only (the new one).

Impossible to consolidate my clip because of the “hidden” file name stored by Premiere Pro, so here is what I done :

Unlink all your duplicate clip (original and the new one) with “Make offline”
Right click on each of them (a little bit fastidious) and click “Edit offline”
Here you have the ability to change the name of your clip, make sure it is absolutely the same, it’s case sensitive. In my case new clip had the extension “.r3d” and the orignal had “.R3D” …
Select all clip and change audio mapping to the same settings. Check frame rate also.
Relink all your media.
Edit > Consolidate duplicates
Et voilà !

Hope that will help someone :)

A

Association37827

Participant

4 years later and this problem is still present. Premiere definitely associates a new ID to a clip each and everytime a file is drag-dropped in the timeline from Windows explorer. I now have some files duplicated more than 50 times, some of them used once, others multiple times.

All of that only because we do not import clips in the timeline the way Premiere would prefer to, but hey it's not my fault if multiple Windows explorer windows offers a better view of my hundreds of clips than an embedded frame in Premiere.

And I've tried all proposed workarounds to merge all those dupplicate into a single clip, none of them works obviously. This is messy...

J

joseph_0716

Participant

Check the path of the duplicate files. Prpro do this weird thing with the paths after importing. Unlink and relink all the duplicates. Need to close project and reopen in order for CD to work!

R

Rashad Wells

Participant

Here's what worked for me:

I needed to consolidate a variety of videos, audio, and images, and "Consolidate Duplicates" wasn't working. So, I created three search bins:

Searchbin 1: Metadata - Media Type | Find: "Movie" OR Metadata - Media Type | Find: "Audio" (to gather all videos and audio in one search bin)
Searchbin 2: Metadata - Media Type | Find: "still image" (to gather all images)
Searchbin 3: Metadata - Media Type | Find: "offline" (to gather all the offline files I was about to make)

These search bins captured everything, including duplicates. Then, I selected all the files in "Searchbin 1" and made them offline. I did the same for "Searchbin 2"

All the files then appeared in "Searchbin 3" as offline files. I selected everything and used the "Link Media" option. After linking, the "Consolidate Duplicates" feature worked perfectly and consolidated everything. Finally, I deleted the search bins.

It's worth mentioning that in the Link Media panel, I had "Relink others automatically" enabled, so I only had to link one, and the others linked instantly.

Path 88 Productions

Known Participant

Brillinat. In the world of "work around" solutons for Premiere, that's a fix that's like traversing the globe --but as long as it works!

So it seems like if even one simple quantum of meta data is different between a media clips Premiere refuses to see it as the "same" and won't consolidate. You process is basically nuking the meta data and giving Premiere a fresh look at the files.

Good job.

_Spliced

Participating Frequently

I wanted to echo what maiathesun says here. I banged my head against the wall trying to get this working again and his 'Modify' tip worked. My example is I already had footage imported in Premiere. I wanted to import an XML from Resolve that had some edits. I import the XML, it creates duplicate clips. I run Consolidate Duplicates, it doesn't work....

First I tried modify > Audio channels on the newly imported clips from the Resolve XML. This didn't work either. Then I noticed the Resolve clips had Mono 2 channel selected. But the clips I had already imported had Stereo 2 channel selected. I ran Modify > Audio Channels on my original imported footage, changed the audio channels to match new resolve clips. Ran Consolidate Duplicates again, and it worked! It removed all of the newly imported clips, keeping my originals intact and the edits in the new sequence using the single reference of the clip. Hope this helps someone.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Thanks for the detailed post!

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

A

Aldy Waani

Known Participant

It's not working on my mac running 23.4.0

but its working on my team running 23.1.0

tried both new projects and projects with XML imported.

A

Amonitas8475

Participating Frequently

Hello ALL!

I believe I've found the solution!!

It's a workaround but it has worked from my testing, let me know if it works for you.

Take your project and export out an XML of the entire project.

The open up a new project and import the XML

For some reason it brings all the timelines in but only ONE instance of the media!!

Hope this worked for everyone else!

S

shakespitAuthor

Participating Frequently

What a cool hack!

dparsons85

Legend

This is so dumb but I found a very cumbersome workaround.

The Audio Channels and Interpret Footage of the assets has to be the same for each clip. To check this r-click on each file, go to Modify > Audio Channels... and Modify > Interpret Footage...

Make sure you click OK on both the Audio Channel and Interpret Footage windows, do not click CANCEL. Even if you never changed the Audio Channels or Interpret Footage settings you might have to do this to get the files to consolidate. Run Consolidate Duplicates again and it should get rid of one of the files.

This happened to me when I imported an old project into a newer version, many of the files would not consolidate despite having the same settings. Adobe, please fix this.

Eyu4

Inspiring

I'm having the same issue. Instead of actually working I'm going from one problem to another, wasting my time. It just feels like Adobe don't truly care about the product and users. Maybe I should've chosen Final Cut instead.

Wouldn't be surprised if people are still having this problem in 2 years from now. (*cough* adobe...).

UPDATE: the workaround I found for now is to close and reopen the project again and again, click consolidate duplicates again, until all are removed. Sometimes media offline > relinking media also works. THIS FEATURE IS TOTALLY BROKEN AND UNEXPECTED.

E

efficient_person1243

Known Participant

Getting up to 5 years of this issue being brought to Adobe's attention and neither their developers or employees have any solutions. Well done team!

R Neil Haugen

Legend

An explanation by a staffer on the pro user's Facebook page was thus: what is normally the causing issue with this, is because of the way the files were "imported" into Premiere. It's kind of a simple explanation, after you understand how Premiere operates.

So I'll get to the explantion after I give a practical explanation on how Premiere actually works. Which clearly isn't how most users think about it.

For a starting point, we need to understand that Premiere's entire function is operating by internal metadata. That's what project files, sequences, everything inside Premiere are ... metadata files that are used to construct what we see as the project. It's all built off of computer data/text files of the media added to the project and the choices made then by the user.

So that's how it works under the hood. Metadata in multiple metadata files. All that sort of text based information, then used to create what we see on screen. Now we've got that down, on to the explanation for consolidation issues.

Premiere's "import" process is simply creating internal metadata references to the file on disk. It doesn't have anything to do with the physical files themselves. Nothing is changed whatever of that original file. This is just setting metadata on the file in Premiere, so it can reference that internally for sequences effects & all that.

When you can't consolidate, again, it is not a problem of 'seeing' the original file. It is all about having multiple, separate metadata instances, within Premiere's systems, for importing that file, each with its own separate data ID within the project. In other words, the same file was imported mulitple times, differently.

Hence mulitple, different metadata ID references to the same physical file.

Each of those internal metadata IDs can be used to successfully 'see' the original file, so ... each is functional and "correct" in operation. And Premiere doesn't therefore see anything that needs correction.

Ok ... that's the underlying thing happening. Whatever, right?

And fine and cool and how dandy the world is and all.

Just ... wouldn't it be nice if they would design a system to handle when there are multiple instances of meta on a file? Pretty please?

As the explanation is fine, interesting, and all that. We users would just like a fully coordinated system that seemed to function correctly for our needs.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

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