Hi All! Unfortunately, while the nesting workflow described does sound very powerful, it's not the way that Cross-Project Referencing (what we loving refer to as XREF) actually works. XREF is designed to create a bridge between the projects where source media lives and where it is used. It was never intended to be a live link between projects across a Production. I've seen it mentioned in this thread a few times that reducing a large project into many smaller projects across a Production has increased performance, decreased load times, and made the overall experience in Premiere Pro better. It is exactly this XREF compartmentalization that results in the performance benefits: in a Production, everything you might access doesn't have to be live in memory, which lets those resources be used elsewhere for a better editing experience.
There's a lot going on under the hood with XREF, but the fundamental piece to consider here is the way that the XREF media bridge works. Take the following example:
We want projectItem 1 to live in project A , but we want to use that same projectItem in a sequence in project B while it continues to only live in project A.
What we actually do is make a hidden affiliate clip of projectItem 1 in project B (let’s call it affiliateItem 1) that look just like projectItem 1, and then link the affiliate back to the original so that, when we want to find the original, we have a path through affialiateItem 1 to traverse along to get back to the project that holds projectItem 1 — extra mileage that you (hopefully) never even knew you travelled. But the point is, the sequences in project B don’t reference or actually use projectItem 1 at all. They reference and use affiliateItem 1.
And the same would be true for sequences. Even if a sequence behaved as XREF clips do and could have an affiliate copy made when it was used as a nest across projects, the resulting nest would be a duplicate of the original, now living in the new project (and in this particular implementation, hidden from view as an affiliate copy, so you couldn't even get to it easily to modify). But all this would theoretically do is give you a link to travel back to the original project that holds the original sequence from which the duplicate was spawned. The contents of each sequence wouldn't mirror and conform to each other - they are not the same sequence, just as affiliateItem 1 is not projectItem 1 .
There is no capcatiy in XREF to provide a direct link across projects between a used nest and its pre-copy original sequence. It's also worth noting that, if this capacity were to exist, source projects would either have to remain open for your entire editing session to keep nest usage updated to match revised source sequences. Or, if not open continuously, those source projects would have to be repeatedly opened, scanned, and linked nests updated to ensure that any source sequence revisions pushed to all nest usage. This would negate the performance benefits already mentioned that the Production structure allows.
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