Nest Sequences With a Shortcut

Since I tend to nest sequences frequently, I’m a big fan of the “Nest Items” shortcut:

Simply select clips on your timeline that you’d like to nest and hit OPT C. You will be presented with the nesting dialogue box and away you go. Nesting is useful in several scenarios, the most obvious being that, in cases where you might be dealing with several different programs (or segments of a larger, more complex program) on separate timelines and you want to put them together on one timeline to output a tape or to combine them into a larger project, using nests is a great solution.

For me, the most useful thing about nesting is that it allows me to add a filter to a whole nested sequence (as if it’s a discreet clip). This comes in handy when I need to make a “window dub” where the timecode (using the timecode generator filter) is overlaid onto the output and I want it to start at 01:00:00:00 (or 00:00:00:00). I quickly nest my sequence using OPT C and add the filter to the nest as a whole. It should be noted that if you simply want to “burn” the actual timecode appearing on the various clips, you do not need a nest–simply add the “timecode reader” filer to all the clips on your timeline. If you do add a filter to a nest, note that to adjust the filter in the Viewer (with the “Filters” tab), you will need to OPTION-Click the nested content up into the Viewer as opposed to simply double-clicking it.

Another benefit of nesting is that, if you have a lot of render-intensicve filters applied to some clips and you nest them (and render that nest on its timeline), you will have less re-rendering when you change in or outpoints of the nest on your new timeline. These details and more can be found in the FCP documentation.