Consolidate Duplicates Not Working

[mjshade]

Running Premiere 15.4.5

I am having trouble getting Consolidate Duplicates to work. Details:

I work with another editor on a production on a NAS. We have assistant editors who work remotely doing selects, translation and captioning, etc., and they have all of our media on local storage (they can't connect to our NAS). The assistant editors' media drives are clones of ours.  

This morning an AE sent me a sequence in a project file that only contains media relevant to the sequence. I first opened my project file with all of the original footage imported and sorted. Then I did "Add project to production" to import the project from the AE, which brought in the sequence and associated master clips (which are duplicates of my original media that has already been imported and sorted in my production). So far so good.

In the past, I have dragged duplicates from projects sent to me by AEs into my original footage folders and then run "Consolidate Duplicates" so I don't have a bloated project full of duplicate masters. Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't I try a few solutions: remove clip ins/outs, make sure the audio channel configuration is the same, make sure the clip names are identical, make sure there aren't separate proxy references, put the master clips in the same root folder in the project, etc. My problem in this case is that nothing I do makes 'consolidate duplicates' do anything.  Any advice on how to make this work would be appreciated! 

[Amonitas8475 · Accepted solution]

Hi!

I believe I've found the solution!!! Let me know if this works for you!

1) Go into your project, click in an empty spot in your project panel.

2) Go to File > Export > Final Cut Pro XML

3) Open up a blank project and import the new XML!

This should bring in all your timelines as well as just ONE instance of all the media!!!