Timelines can get messy! Once you start adding b-roll and titles and generators, or create a video with eight clips (or more!) on screen at once, your timeline can end up looking like a pile of loosely organized Lego blocks. At their most basic level, making compound clips can help tidy up a complex timeline. But the deeper you dig, the more and more functionality we can derive from them. For FCP7 users (as well as users of other pro editors), compound clips are the next generation version of nested sequences, but have much more potential as we'll learn down the line.
We have a timeline shown in the following screenshot, where four clips have been stacked on top of one another, and resized and moved to fit in four corners of the screen. Following these four clips is another individual clip:
Let's see how we can we create a transition, so that our four-screen video wall fades into the following full-screen clip:
