What is a sequence?

[Bill Sprague]

I've been using Premiere Elements for several years and am comfortable with it.  After several false starts, I've promised myself that I will learn Premiere Pro.   I'm at home for a few weeks and I'm making progress!  For now I'm confused about what a "sequence" is.  

With Premiere Elements, you add clips to the project, put them on the timeline, edit and export.   There are no "sequences".

Please help me understand what sequences are, why they are there and what they are used for.   Can I just ignore them? 

Thanks in advance!

[cvid01]

Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzNTrgH95PE

Try pressing Help on your Premiere Pro menu for more information.

[Bill Sprague]

Thank you cvid01.  I watched that same YouTube yesterday.  It's very good at showing how sequences are constructed.  It left me confused as to what they are actually for! 

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

When you add clips to the Timeline panel, what you've done is create a sequence of clips. You can have a thousand sequences in one project in Premiere if you wanted to ... name each one, and you can work on them, copy/paste from one to another, use one sequence to start your rought-cut work, and drag/drop or insert/overwrite clips or segments of clips from that sequence to your working or final sequence.

Copy a sequence, and make some changes to see how that plays versus the original sequence.

There's a ton of things editors do with multiple sequences.

Neil

[Peru Bob]

In short: A sequence is a timeline.

Multiple sequences are available in a Premiere Pro project, while Premiere Elements only allows one timeline per project.

[cvid01]

Check these out:

https://helpx.adobe.com/search-results.html?q=What%20is%20a%20sequence

[Bill Sprague]

Neil and Bob, 

Thank you for helping me!   

Let me give you an example.  Lets say I have three clips of preflighting and airplane, three clips of starting the engine and three more clips of the takeoff procedure.   Do I make three sequences with three clips each?  Or do I make one sequence with all nine clips?  

If I make three sequences of three clips each, how do I put them into one final video?

Again, thanks!  

[R Neil Haugen]

I would simply make one longer sequence, adding all the bits in.

But on bigger projects, it's very handy to be able to break things up, each scene is its own sequence. And you can either drag/drop that onto another sequence as the component clips, or as a "nest" ... which seemingly makes all clips from the other sequence into one clip on the sequence it is nested into.

Neil

[Bill Sprague]

Thank you cvid01!

The first video in that link turned on some dim brain bulbs.  "How to nest a sequence in Premiere Pro" added the missing concept.  Premiere Elements doesn't do "nesting" so I was missing that concept.  This is a little like layers in Photoshop.  It will take some time to get my head wrapped around it.   The possibilities for a complex project are near endless!

[Bill Sprague]

Neil, Bob and "cvid01",

You've collectively "made my day".  Thanks for the generous help.  I have been stuck on "sequences" for too long!

A long time ago, Bill Hunt and Steve Grisetti (both ACPs) coached me through video editing with Premiere Elements in that forum.  (Bill sadly disappeared years ago.)  Without them I would have been stuck.  With their help I was also able to help my granddaughters learn video creation.   What a thrill that was!

After a while I started noticing questions I could answer and felt a need to "pay it back".   A couple years went by and I was asked to be on the ACP team if I kept trying to questions.  I try to do that once or twice a day and it has been 10 years since my first purchase of Premiere Elements! 

The pandemic is creating time to learn all the fantastic software Adobe provides.   With luck and your fantastic help, I may actually learn how to make use of some great stuff!

Bill