Nest a sequence

In the same way that you might add a clip to a sequence, you can also add a sequence to a sequence.

And this is called nesting.

The sequence you add is described as a nested sequence.

I have a sequence here with three clips at the beginning and then a longer clip after.

And I'd like to nest these three clips at the start, so that I can work with them as one and apply effects to them.

You can use any existing sequence as a source clip by just dragging it into another sequence.

But you can also select clips already edited into a sequence and nest them in a single step.

And that's what I'm going to do right here.

First, I'm going to lasso to select these three clips and then I'm going to right click on any one of the selected clips and I'm going to choose Nest...

Enter a name for the newly created nested sequence.

And to make this nice and visible, I'm just going to call it NEST, and click OK.

Right away you can see the newly created sequence has appeared in the Project panel.

And we've got a new item in the Timeline.

I'm going to double click this NEST sequence in the Project panel and I'll just double click on the Video 1 header to make it a bit taller and zoom in a bit and you can see those three clips.

If I go back to my main sequence, you can see that I can grab this single item and move it anywhere I want.

I can drag it to a different location in the Timeline and of course I can apply effects to it as a single step.

This is great for applying things like picture in picture.

I'll just undo that with Command Z here on MacOS or Control Z on Windows and go back into my nested sequence.

Now I'm going to take the second clip in the nested sequence and move it out of the way just to the end of the sequence, so I have a gap between the first and third clips.

If I go back to the main sequence, I now have that gap.

So, any changes you make dynamically update in this way.

I'm going to go back to the nest and making sure that snapping is enabled which it is in the Timeline panel, I'm going to drag this back into position.

Back in my main sequence you can see the clip has returned.

I'm going to select this nested sequence now and remove it by pressing Backspace or Delete.

But of course, the sequence remains in the Project panel.

It is just another sequence like any other.

I'm going to drag this in back to the original position.

And interestingly you'll notice when I do that, I now have an audio clip.

But of course, the original contents that I put into the nested sequence, had no audio.

And so, I just got a single video clip when I nest it from inside of the Timeline panel.

But if we look in the nested sequence which I still have open in the Timeline panel, of course there is an audio track.

And that's because the default settings for new sequences in Premiere Pro include an audio track.

And that's what appears in the Project panel.

I'm going to go back to my main sequence and this time instead of double clicking the nested sequence.

I'm going to drag it into the Source Monitor.

Once you've got clips in a sequence, you're absolutely free to view them in the Source Monitor as a sequence and in fact if I add In and Out marks as I'm doing now, and I'll just scroll over a little bit in the Timeline panel and drag this in.

You can see that I get just the piece that I've marked with In and Out points.

And there's one more very important feature to show you.

I'm going to right click here at the bottom of the Source Monitor and I'm going to choose Clear In and Out.

And I'm going to drag in again to show you the entire nested sequence and I'll just scroll over a little bit.

At the very top left of the Timeline panel is this button which is called Insert and overwrite sequences as nests or individual clips.

When this button is lit in blue every time you drag a sequence into another sequence, you'll get the entire sequence as a single clip that you can work with for effects and so on.

But if you click on this button to switch it off, and now I'm going to edit this sequence in again, you get just the clips that are incorporated into that sequence.

This feature allows for powerful advanced workflows for media management because you can put clips into sequences to organize them and then use the sequences themselves as I suppose a kind of virtual bin.

It's very useful for arranging your content.

But be aware that you'll need to have this button switched on for you to nest sequences when you drag them from the Project panel.

So, that's nesting sequences in Adobe Premiere Pro.