Re: Am I misunderstanding nesting?

This is my experience too. I have not been able to find consistent or thorough explanations of the behaviour nor the rationale for it elsewhere; so I've compiled from my own experience (FCP 6.0.3):

opt-c -- creates a nest (we know that); and a copy is created in the browser

now: if you want to reuse the nest within the same sequence, or somewhere else, you will quickly break the "parent" nest relationship unless you either:

a) drag the nest that was created in the browser, to the viewer; edit from there.
b) select your nest in the sequence and hit shift-return to open it in a *new* viewer; edit from there (via dragging only, since F9 F10 etc. only work on the default viewer)

other variations like using copy and paste, or using F to bring a match frame up in the viewer and attempting to edit from there, will create new copies of the nest, not connected to the original nest and therefore not connected to any traceable file in the browser. The logical distinction between these techniques, and whatever rationale the FCP devels had for implementing it this way, I have no idea of, so to me it seems like a hole.

In Kevin Monahan's book on FCP Motion Graphics BTW, he insists that the behaviour is quite consistent and that all nests will remain connected unless you actually go to the browser and *duplicate* the created nest and edit from that. This may have been the implementation in an earlier version but it doesn't seem to be any more. Wish it were.





Lu Nelson
Berlin, Germany