Am I misunderstanding nesting?

[Bob Flood]

thanx tom

I will try this soon and see whats up

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[Dylan Reeve]

Well, I am definitely not using copy and paste, and yet I am not getting the expected results with nesting consistently (I believe a couple of the nests work as I want, but most don’t).

[Chris Poisson]

FYI this is a good thing to know:

https://www.fcpworld.com/fcpworld/EX5_4.html

Have a wonderful day.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Dylan Reeve] “Is this right? It certainly was my impression that a nested sequence was more like a link to another sequence, but now it appears to be more like a copy of a sequence (which seems much less useful).

I haven’t got the manual handy at the moment (I’m at home now) but the stuff I’ve read online seems a little ambiguous on exactly how this relationship works.”

This is correct, if you simply create the Nest and put it into the Browser, anytime you bring that into another Sequence, that will be an independent nest.

The way to do your workflow is to start the same way, create the Nest, drag that nest into your Compile Sequence.

Now anytime you want to make a change to Ep 1 – Part 1, you simply double click that in the Compile sequence. That will open the Ep – Part 1 timeline and you can make changes that will be reflected in the Compile timeline.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Dylan Reeve]

That is counter-intuitive.

I expect whatever is in the Browser to be the authoritative collection of what exists in the project. At least generally.

So if I’m using the sequence called ‘Ep 1 – Part 1’ as a nest in another sequence, I would expect that changes to the sequence in the Browser (the source essentially) would be reflected. Instead as soon as I create that nest I essentially obsolete original sequence, as no changes I make will be reflected in my nested uses of the sequence. If I wanted that result, I would duplicate the sequence before I nested it.

[Russell Lasson]

I guess the reason why it’s set up that way is because that’s the way that clips behave. When you put a clip in the timeline, it becomes independent of the clip in the browser.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT

[Walter Biscardi]

[Dylan Reeve] “That is counter-intuitive.

I expect whatever is in the Browser to be the authoritative collection of what exists in the project. At least generally.”

It is, but it’s actually a strength of FCP when you figure out what it’s doing. When you drop a clip, or a nest, into a timeline, it becomes independent of what is in the Browser.

So your clip in the Browser remains untouched exactly how it was captured or placed in there. This is a good thing so you always have the original clip at your disposal.

Coming from another NLE, this would probably seem counter to what you would want, but once you get used to it, you can use it to your advantage.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Dylan Reeve]

I suppose so. But if the source file of a clip changes then all clips referencing that source file will reflect that change (in theory, in practice I see that can sometimes be a little quirky). That’s how I’d expect the nesting to work.

In our case we’re dealing with each program part as a separate sequence (as we have to do that for Color and just carry on that way). So when all is said and done (in theory) we put the parts in another sequence as the finished ep. Then, if when we’re reviewing that episode we see something that needs attention, we would go to that part’s sequence (as that’s the master for that part of the episode) and make a change. That change however isn’t reflected in our output master. The other option is that we edit the part by double-clicking the nest in the episode sequence, but the limitation there is that the change we make there exists only there. If that output sequence were to be deleted, or we were to come back later (to make DVDs for example) and look just at the parts, we’d have lost any changes we made in the nested part.

Given what a nested sequence is, this functionality doesn’t make sense to me, even given the clip independence thing. The sequence is more akin to the actual video content (file) than the clip as it exists in the bin.

Coming from Avid, this functionality doesn’t even exist (although given the non-relative nature of it, I suppose it does, in the form of editing one sequence into another and collapsing it).

[Lu Nelson]

This is my experience too. I have not been able to find consistent or thorough explanations of the behaviour nor the rationale for it elsewhere; so I’ve compiled from my own experience (FCP 6.0.3):

opt-c — creates a nest (we know that); and a copy is created in the browser

now: if you want to reuse the nest within the same sequence, or somewhere else, you will quickly break the “parent” nest relationship unless you either:

a) drag the nest that was created in the browser, to the viewer; edit from there.
b) select your nest in the sequence and hit shift-return to open it in a *new* viewer; edit from there (via dragging only, since F9 F10 etc. only work on the default viewer)

other variations like using copy and paste, or using F to bring a match frame up in the viewer and attempting to edit from there, will create new copies of the nest, not connected to the original nest and therefore not connected to any traceable file in the browser. The logical distinction between these techniques, and whatever rationale the FCP devels had for implementing it this way, I have no idea of, so to me it seems like a hole.

In Kevin Monahan’s book on FCP Motion Graphics BTW, he insists that the behaviour is quite consistent and that all nests will remain connected unless you actually go to the browser and *duplicate* the created nest and edit from that. This may have been the implementation in an earlier version but it doesn’t seem to be any more. Wish it were.

Lu Nelson
Berlin, Germany

[Dave Gardner]

Dylan describes exactly the functionality I need and expected from nested sequences. I’m editing a documentary, so I’m constantly updating segments that we treat as a sequence to be nested in the final program. However I really need to save a copy of a segment before making significant revisions. The intuitive way to do this is to duplicate that segment’s sequence, rename it as draft 3 or whatever, and then modify it. But I cannot do that unless I’m willing to rebuild the master program sequence by dragging the new updated segments into that timeline. Bummer.

Dave Gardner
Producer/Director/Writer
Visions West
Compelling Documentaries for Broadcast, Business & Communities


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