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Inspiring
December 20, 2025
Answered

Is It Possible to Import Multiple Streams as a Single Clip That Expands into Stacked Layers in PR

  • December 20, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 682 views

Hello Adobe Community,

I am currently developing an Importer using the Premiere Pro SDK.

The goal of the importer I am working on is to function purely as a dummy clip.
When a file is dropped onto the timeline from a CEP panel, the Project panel, or Windows Explorer, it should only store the start time and duration and then be removed.
In other words, the clip itself does not represent actual media.

The behavior of the Premiere Composer importer plugin matches exactly what I am aiming to achieve.

At the moment, I have successfully implemented importing as a single clip, and this works as expected.
However, I have been unable to implement the behavior where multiple streams are recognized as a single clip, but when dropped onto the timeline, they are expanded into a stacked, layered structure.

To be honest, I am not even certain whether this kind of behavior is achievable at the Importer API level.

I have already spent a significant amount of time working on importer development, but unfortunately, I have made no real progress on this issue.

If there are any experienced or knowledgeable developers here, I would sincerely appreciate your guidance on how this might be solved.

Below is a summary of what I have observed so far.

When GetInfo8 returns imIterateStreams and I advertise the existence of multiple streams to the host,
Premiere places them into the Bin as a single clip.

When I assign a streamName to each stream,
Premiere places them into the Bin as two separate streams.

I would like to try labeling streams using imQueryStreamLabel,
but this selector has never been called, and I have no understanding of under what conditions it is triggered.
It has never been invoked so far.

When I set streamsAsComp to true,
Premiere loads a sequence and one clip with two streams into the Bin,
and within the sequence, the streams are expanded and stacked.

The behavior also changes depending on whether the streams share the same metadata or not.

This is the closest I have come to a positive result, since the streams are at least stacked inside a sequence.
However, because they are contained within a sequence in the Bin,
the file cannot be dropped directly onto the timeline, which defeats the purpose.

I have tried many other approaches as well,
but I have not been able to achieve the desired result.

No matter what I do,
I cannot seem to implement an importer that is recognized as a single clip
and expands into stacked layers when dropped onto the timeline.

Is there any known solution, workaround, or even a hint
that could point me in the right direction?

Was this functionality implemented through an unofficial approach,
or possibly reverse engineering?

I am truly desperate for help.
This feature is something I really need to implement.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Correct answer Bruce Bullis

>The behavior of the Premiere Composer importer plugin matches exactly what I am aiming to achieve.

 

While I cannot provide any details specific to Mister Horse's implementation, I can confirm that they're using public APIs to accomplish that behavior. 

 

What I think is missing from your approach as described [above], is establishing a communications channel "behind PPro's back", so that your .mhbricks Importer plugin can drive your UXP plugin to import and arrange assets, to match the info in the .mhbricks file. 

1 reply

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Community Expert
December 29, 2025

Hi, @powerful_think1966:

 

Could you mock-up a screen shot of what this might look like?

 

"Streams" and "Clips" are the same thing.  So, to have multiple streams as single clip is a little confusing.  

Inspiring
December 29, 2025

872067i5FCD3C681CD33FF1.png

In the first screenshot, the .mhbricks clip is imported as a single item in the Project panel.
However, when selected, the timeline track indicators show V1, V2, A1, and A2 as active, which means the clip internally contains multiple streams even though it appears as one clip.

 

 

872066i7DC29A4D4C8D3DAC.png

In the second screenshot, when I start dragging this single clip onto the timeline, Premiere automatically expands it based on the internal stream layout.
The clip previews exactly as V1 / V2 for video layers and A1 / A2 for audio layers, and once dropped, it correctly places each stream as stacked tracks on the timeline.

 

In my current implementation, a file can only be imported as a single clip when it advertises one video stream and multiple audio streams.


However, as soon as I advertise more than one video stream (e.g., V1 + V2), Premiere seems to fall back to a different behavior and loads the content into the Bin folder as separate items, instead of keeping it as one unified clip.

My goal is to achieve the same behavior as .mhbricks, where:

Multiple video streams (V1, V2, V3, …) and

Multiple audio streams (A1, A2, …)

 

can all be recognized as internal layered streams, while still importing as a single clip in the Project panel, and expanding into stacked tracks only when dropped on the timeline.

Bruce Bullis
Bruce BullisCorrect answer
Legend
January 5, 2026

>The behavior of the Premiere Composer importer plugin matches exactly what I am aiming to achieve.

 

While I cannot provide any details specific to Mister Horse's implementation, I can confirm that they're using public APIs to accomplish that behavior. 

 

What I think is missing from your approach as described [above], is establishing a communications channel "behind PPro's back", so that your .mhbricks Importer plugin can drive your UXP plugin to import and arrange assets, to match the info in the .mhbricks file.