NLE Tips – Week 2: Adobe Premiere Pro – Stacked Sequences

digitalfilms by Oliver Peters

If you are used to editing in Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro “legacy”, then you are familiar with the concept of tabbed sequences. That is, you can have several open sequences, which each appear as a tab in the timeline window. This lets editor work between them, using copy and paste functions or compare one version of an edit to another.

Adobe’s interface design is based on dockable windows. In Premiere Pro, this means you can arrange the window layout in various custom workspace configurations that are conducive to your personal style or task needs. Sequences can be torn off into separate window elements. They may then be docked as a tab or embedded into any of four sides of the window as a separate pane within that window. Therefore, you can easily dock two sequences on top of each other within the same timeline window. When you do this, the focus of the sequence viewer and the effects control panel will follow whichever clip is selected by the editor in either sequence.

Let’s say that you like to work from a “selected takes” sequence to a second sequence that is a “cutdown” of these selects. Stack one sequence above the other and then simply drag a clip from sequence 1 to sequence 2. Or highlight a clip in sequence 1, copy it and paste it to sequence 2. This also makes it easy to re-arrange the order of clips from one sequence to the other, when building stories based on soundbite and voice-over elements. read more...