Productions and nested sequences

[Rob Claisse]

I've been excited to use Productions as my Premiere projects are pretty big and by the end of a project, which typically last a couple of years, the project takes a while to load, save and just starts to act a bit funky!

My first look at shifting my last project over to a multi-project Production was pretty straight forward and it does pretty much what I want, with what was one big monalithic project being split into 4-5 smaller projects and now I can open up these projects quickly and I think this will be a big help but one issue. It would seem that a sequence can't be shared across projects, ie you can't nest a sequence X that is in one project A, inside a sequence Y in another project B without getting sequence X copied over to project B. Which is a real shame as I have had to use nested sequences a lot over the years to get around limitations in Premiere. Anyone else seeing this or am I doing something wrong?

[afhenke13]

Rob,

I think I am running into a similiar issue. I have been migrating a feature documentary project over to the new Production workflow, and as you reported everything was rather straightforward and funtioning, except my nests.

In the new Production organization, I was attempting to have a Project entirely dedicated to my nested sequences, as I had a folder for such in my old massive project. Similar to yourself, my nested sequences are almost entirely FX workarounds for my b-roll clips. Thus, they are inside of and throughout my larger "Chapter" sequences for the film, and have litle need to be consistently opened/accessed after initial generation.

Upon attempting to move the nests from the old organizational structure to the new "Nests" project in the Production, I ended up with a new Nests project full of duplicates of all the sequences that are not linked to a use in any Chapter sequence. And the original copies of the nest sequences seem to have not moved and remain in the Project that contains the Chapter sequence they are nested in.

In conclusion, this is perhaps not exactly your issue, but I can at least confirm something seems to be less than optimal in how nested sequences are stored/handled in this new workflow.

[andymees@aje]

Ditto.

Finally got some down time today and have migrated a copy of my current doc project over to a production. Process was simple enough, if time consuming, and now my 'current edit' timeline is super responsive. Very happy with that.

But, yes, my quick and dirty PPro 'comps' aren't quite getting into the spirit of things, separate 'Comps' project wise. In retrospect, I probably should have used After Effects compostions.

I'm also currently seeing an issue with Reverse Match Frame not working across sequences in separate projects (within same production) ... but that may be because I'm testing this with the public beta.

[Rob Claisse]

Well good to see it's not just me that has had to use nested comps and how is stuck with lots of duplicates across projects. Going forward I can probably work around the issue for new projects/productions but such a shame because I still need to access and work on these older projects and they are so dog slow as one project, way faster as productions but I now have the overhead of needing to ensure I update a nested sequence across half a dozen projects if I make any small changes.

Be great if someone from the Premiere Team could let us know if this is ever something they might fix or whether we need to put up with it and adapt in the future?

[Rob Claisse]

I've created an "idea" on the Premiere Uservoice forum too as this seems to have more chance of getting through to the people at Adobe (well that might be wishful thinking!). Vote it up and maybe we'll get some resolution to this in the future:

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/40408240-allow-nested-seque...

[R Neil Haugen]

Currently, if you bring a sequence from one project into another with the 'nest-or-not' button active, or bring a previously nested sequence, it adds that seqeunce to the second project essentially as a "clip", though if you double-click that nest on the timeline, it does open up the original layout of the clips involved.

And yes, it appears that when we bring in a sequence as a nest, that new nest "clip" is definitely divorced from other uses of it in the Production folder. So you would have to go into each project and change that nested sequence.

If you bring in a 'regular' (non-nested) sequence, without the nest-or-not button active, it simply adds the media of that sequence to the current timeline without adding media to that project's file.

I too would like an explanation on how to get "standard" behavior of a nested segment. As yes, it would be preferable to be able to 'ripple' changes in a nest through other uses in other project files.

Neil

[Ines Vogel]

Hey All! Were there any fixes to the nested sequences in Productions? I need to have VFX comps sequences (nested) and it seems to carry them and make dupes, in a very disorganized way :/. Any advice on how best to handle this? Thanks! 

[R Neil Haugen]

Wondering if @Bruce Bullis might be able to get an answer on this?

Neil

[Bruce Bullis]

No news to report.

[_shirky_]

Curious Bruce have there been any updates with this?

[Ben Insler]

@_shirky_ I just posted a reply to the main thread addressing why sequences behave the way they do, and why they do not behave the same way as media.

The best workflow I can advise would be to use Dynamic Link (which andymees@aje did mention) to build the nests you need as After Effects Comps which can then update across all sequences in any number of projects as soon as the .AEP is saved.  If you used Render and Replace to render these comps in their Premiere Pro sequences, you would, of course, need to Restore Unrendered to bring back the live .AEP and see these changes take effect, but I can envision a workflow where all Dynamic Links were placed on a specific track in any sequence using them, so that the renders can be uniformly cleared and re-rendered (I say uniformly, but this would still be a manual sequence-by-sequence process).

@Ines Vogel 

in a very disorganized way

It's actually quite organized 🙂  When Premiere copies the nested sequences, it also duplicates the same folder structure to the nest from the source project.  So if your nest lives right at the root of the source project, it'll appear at the root of the target project.  But if your nest lives in GFX\January\Lower3rd\bokeh_style\, you'll get that same folder tree in the target project.

[Ben Insler · Accepted solution]

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.