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STOP DUPLICATE MEDIA FROM BEING IMPORTED

This has not been fixed even though Adobe has claimed to fix this.

I have the media in one master project. My assistant has a their shared project. I open a small sequence from that project and drag the media from it it into my main project. EVEN THOUGH I ALREADY HAVE ALL THE MEDIA, I STILL GET DUPLICATED MEDIA. And on top of that it creates a separate folder for each small clip of footage. Take a look at the attached screenshot.

This is horrible. Fix this asap please. What's the point of shared projects if we can't move media back and forth between them?

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Gil Seltzer shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • Rune Karlsen commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    TIP: Make sure the Audio Channel definition is the same on the clips you already have in the project as the clips in the sequence you are importing, otherwise Premiere seems to regard them as different clips.

  • JK commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    voted. Please fix. It even generates a separate Proxy. So annoying. i sometime forget i had already imported a clip and then i find i have two.

  • Kevin Monahan commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This should be fixed now if you are sharing projects with the Productions feature. Please try it.

  • larry towers commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I think the problem here is the just because YOU know that a sequence is shared, it doesn't mean the computer knows it is. There should be an explicit option to "link to existing source media" when importing any sequence. This however is fraught with potential pitfalls. Importing media with the sequence is the safest thing because it is linked to media that is know to be working. There are unfortunately too many instances I have encountered where supposedly duplicated media isn't a byte for byte duplicate, resulting crashing etc.
    The other thing to be reminded of is that Premiere doesn't play anything in real time, and the media cache info for an imported sequence may need to be rebuilt dynamically for the new system, unless one is using shared storage where everything is in one central location.

  • Anonymous commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    So you guys have been working in this since 2016 -- what's your success rate at this point?

    How many film projects will have to explode after a year of sharing edits with two editors? This duplicate media bug has almost been around since inception. Next time you want to come out with a 2020 update -- wait -- test your **** with a real editor on a large project - and see if it works before you take our money. stop the Full software updates with same bugs. should be illegal.

  • Derek Sajbel commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hey folks, learned that if you command I or file>import and select "import selected sequences"
    check the "create folder for imported items" and uncheck "allow importing duplicate media". It's a better workflow that avoids this problem until media browser is capable of this as well.

  • Ryan Schroeder commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Adam B, Philip Owens - agreed, I can’t seem to sort out why it sometimes works & sometimes doesn’t.

    I’ve triple checked that the media path is precisely the same across both projects and Premiere still creates duplicate media.

  • Philip Owens commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Adam B - I've tried Media Browser and dynamic link many, many times, and I think maybe once it's worked without importing duplicates. Colleagues have reported the same level of unreliability. So maybe it works now and again, but it's definitely not a working solution.

  • Adam Biskupski commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Forgive me if I"m getting this wrong but have you tried importing using media browser & dynamic link? We just used it between myself and assistants on a feature and worked (although sluggish) without any dupe media.

  • Michael Gyori commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    All I have to do to witness thisis open two projects and move one sequence over from one to the other. Media that is already in both projects is duplicated in the destination project in an identical directory structure... it doesn't even merge directories. I've given up keeping a nice project structure and just throw duplicates into the parent root directory. It makes a mess under the hood, but don't have time to correct this severe software deficiency.

  • Philip Owens commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    You're looking for input, so we're giving it. I usually try to do media organization in PP exactly as on disk -it helps with media management on a large project. For example, I have a large Archival folder, growing every day. As I get a clearer picture of what a particular piece of media relates to, I move it into a newly named category folder in the Finder. Multiply this by hundreds of the same operations and things in PP get extremely confused(as do I - why, if I move a clip and its cfa and pek does PP not 'like' it in a new location?).

    To deal with this should be as simple as deleting the entire Archival folder in PP and dragging the new Archival in, with all the media newly organized. But you can't do this as the media clips are deleted from your sequences when you delete the folder. Yes, you could go through one by one and re-locate them, but that is messy and time consuming. So the old folder just becomes yet another piece of garbage piling up in my zDELETE folder, waiting for the day when you fix this issue.

  • Cameron commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Reg Santo Tomas, just to give my input on what improvements to this workflow would look like:

    I 100% agree with everything said by Philip, Michael, Brian, Alan, and everyone else below. I think the basics of what we're looking for is simple (in concept, maybe not execution!).

    At the barest minimum as a temporary improvement, documentation on how Consolidate Duplicates works, what criteria it uses, would help us set up projects in a way that we can count on predictable results - fixable dupes or unfixable dupes. And something showing the results before or after using it.

    A step up from that would be giving us some control over how Premiere should evaluate potential duplicates, as Alan mentioned. Whatever criteria is currently being used is leading to the vast majority of duplicates being missed, at least in my case. For example, if I know that all my media have unique names, I could enable that as a criteria for consolidation. I’m guessing that specific option alone would probably solve a lot of my problems.

    In addition, duplicates should be prevented from being created in the first place. Even if it requires some user input, like a dialog that pops up to get confirmation when potential dupes are detected on import, it would be well worth it.

    Like Philip, I'm editing a feature doc with a ton of footage, and a lot of back and forth of project files/sequences with second/assistant editors. Having hundreds (thousands?) of duplicate files and folders leads to pretty terrible downstream impacts. Ballooning project files becoming slow to open and laggy to work in. Master clip effects are useless because there are multiple master clips to track down. Searching through deep nests of duplicate bins with inconsistent contents. Etc. etc.

    We've tested as many possible workflow options as we could think of to test what causes dupes and what doesn't, but haven't figured out any rhyme or reason to it (diff import options, shared project workflow, etc). File path differences makes sense as a possible cause, but identical media paths also generate dupes very often. Also, having multiple copies of media in use seems like a common enough circumstance that we need a fix for that use case anyway.

    In fact I think multiple media mappings in general (as I believe it works in Team Projects) is a related fix that would be distinct but perhaps helpful (see my request here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/35956693-media-mapping-support-for-all-project-types).

    Premiere’s duplicate problem is the only current bug/missing feature serious enough that it makes me consider jumping ship… It’s a nightmare right now.

    Happy to provide any specific examples/logs/data/walkthroughs/conversation if it helps move a fix for this along!

  • Philip Owens commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    >Luke Flegg commented · January 13, 2019 2:04 PM
    >
    >Edit > Consolidate duplicates.

    And that's one of the issues with the current setup. There is no documentation for that command that I can find. I ran it, it did something because it beachballed. But I didn't know if I'd used the command correctly, and I didn't know when the beach ball stopped if it had done anything - I could certainly see no change. I saved the project as a new version, because I had no idea if it had done good things or bad things, and I still don't.

    So, if it does anything, an official explanation please. And please- make it be MUCH more informative process to run.

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