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Nested Assets

A nested asset is an EDL session that embeds an existing EDL session, all tracks, all plugins, editing, and effects into a media object that appears as one audio/video media object, no plugins, editing, or effects. It is as if the existing EDL was rendered, and loaded in its place. This has several interesting side effects. First, you don’t have to render the entire media file to see any portion. Second, it requires no rendering compute time or storage. Third, it changes the precedence of the composer so that you get more control over the projection and automation, so that the results can be sent into another rendering step, not simply part of the current stack. It groups the plugin stack in much the same way that an arithmetic expression is grouped by parenthesis.

The EDL session and the rendered output are visually equivalent. Nested assets allow for complex grouping and stacking of effects, and makes media access much more flexible. This feature can be used recursively, that is, any number of sessions may be stacked and referenced as an asset, as long as all of the rendering resources are available. Nested assets are added to the timeline by using the pulldown File → Load files...on the main menu and selecting the Insertion strategy of Nest asset. The file will be pasted into the timeline over the current selection or at the insertion point.

It is somewhat important to note that nested assets and nested clips will have index files automatically created. These index files can start to clutter up your $HOME/.bcast5 directory with files named Nested_###.idx and you may want to periodically delete any index files which are no longer in use.