Adobe Premiere – Getting rid of duplicates after importing

Adobe Premiere CC (and older versions) have an annoying bug that when you import a sequence which references the same files into another file, it will create duplicates of the master clips. There is no easy fix for this – however I have a workaround.

  1. Make sure you have a current backup of the project file.
  2. Import the sequence.
  3. Manually put all the duplicated clips into a new Bin called “duplicates” (if there are duplicated Bins, you need to also put the clips from them essentially creating one messy “duplicates” Bin, and delete the empty Bins afterwards).
  4. Save the file and close Premiere.
  5. Change the extension of the project file to .gz and unpack it either with 7zip or Total Commander.
  6. Open the extracted file in Notepad++ or Sublime Text (or any other text editor that can handle huge files).
  7. Do a search for the phrase: “duplicates”.
  8. You’ll see your bin there, represented in text. Below you should see a long list of UUIDs (universally unique identifiers). Note the first one in the list, and the last one.
  9. Delete the whole section with the UUIDs.
  10. Now, go search for your first UUID. There should be only one match. Below, you should see all of the other UUIDs which appeared before listed in individual sections. Delete all of those sections up until the last one, which you also noted down.
  11. Save the project file. You should be able to open it (you don’t need to compress it, Premiere will do that for you on the next save).
  12. Voilà, the Bin “duplicates” should be now empty and you can safely delete it. You have just got rid of the duplicates.

Problem mentioned:

  1. http://forums.adobe.com/message/4787167
  2. http://forums.adobe.com/message/5065675