Multiple copies of an OMF while copying session

[Melissa]

My PT session for a short film has several audio tracks, and at some point I imported an OMF from the foley department. I worked directly from this OMF (maybe the problem started here?) with editing, processing, etc.

Now that I was saving a copy of the session to another location, I was surprised to see that it required around 250 GB, where the Audio Files folder only was 16 GB. Not knowing where the issue was, I still made the copy.

Later on, checking the Audio Files folder of the copied session, I had over 400 instances of the OMF, all with the same creation date and most of them with the complete size. It seems that it´s an instance for every clip that was not processed.

Trying it out, I moved all OMF files, except one, to another folder and tried to open my session. ProTools still needed to locate the OMF´s or else the audio clips associated with it, would be stated as missing files. I restored the OMF´s to the Audio Files folder, but ProTools is still not finding them.

Why is ProTools doing this and could I have avoided it by duplicated the OMF tracks and work from the copied audio clips?

I have ProTools 10.

Thanks!

[Philip Perkins]

Was this export from Premiere...?    I have had many OMFs from Premiere with as many as 4 duplications of every clip, with the 2nd 2 being the right length and name but having no audio in them (but still taking disk space).  For going to PT I'd ask for AAF instead of OMF, I think you'll have less trouble of this kind.

[Melissa]

It came from Cubase. The original AAF in the session, from Premiere, never gave me trouble, actually. 

Now, I would just copy the OMF´s audio files with new names to actually create new files unrelated to the OMF. However, it´s very screwed up workflow and I could not find any information on this.

[Wandering Ear]

When you created the original session, did you link to the source media (omf), or copy from the source media?  As a test, try creating a new session, importing the omf again and copy the media instead of linking and see if it fixes the problem.

[Melissa]

Thank you for the suggestion! Just tried saving two copies of new sessions where I imported the OMF again, one linking and another one copying and it is how you say. Good to know!

[Wandering Ear]

I never used to have good luck linking to an embedded omf.  When I was a music editor I always asked for referenced omf's with an external folder of audio, both so I could link to it speeding up the ingest, and also because the media would often go over 2gb forcing multiple embedded omf's.  Then fcp became popular and that went away.

[Melissa]

Yeah, I see. I thought I would make the project smaller by linking instead of copying, but it would make workflow simpler by having an external folder with the audio files, so at least PT could maybe look for those instead of creating another instance of the entire OMF. Will never choose to link again.