The X-Sequencer is designed to perform advanced editing operations on the sequence.

The following descriptions will clarify it:

- sequence – a set of images (frames) stored on disk

- x-sequence – a set of references to the sequence images

- x-frame – a held frame in the x-sequence, shown with an asterisk.

- frame – it is captured frame and possible amount of x-frames, which determines duration of the frame

- X-Sequencer (a.k.a. exposure sheet) – sequence editor, which includes x-sequence. For example - you have captured 1 frame. On disk it is one physical file. In the X-Sequencer you can multiply this frame to any amount, but on the disk is still the one frame. Another example – you have captured 10 frames. All captured frames are automatically added to a x-sequence. You can determine “Hold” value to tell AnimatorDV how many frames must be added to the x-sequence. If the “Hold” value is equal to 1, x-sequence will contain 10 frames (with 1 frame duration, no x-frames). If the value is 2 – in the x-sequence will be 20 frames (10 frames with 2 frames duration, each frame has one x-frame). ”Hold” set to 10 makes 100 frames in the x-sequence, but still only 10 on disk (each frame has 9 x-frames).
Even if you copy all 100 frames and paste at the end of x-sequence, you get 200 frames, but still only 10 frames are stored on disk.
The bottom line – physical sequence stored on the disk is useless rather. But don’t be afraid. New solutions included in AnimatorDV will help you make use of x-sequence:

- AVI export is based on the x-sequence.
- export to Adobe Premiere and After Effects is based on the
x-sequence also. Once more it is based on the stored files – no additional disk space for exported frames is required.
- all the other functions including playback and managing are based on the x-sequence.

As you can see, x-sequence is now a base.