When I copy and paste a group of sections from a snippet to reuse, I generally would expect them to be new instances of the snippet that I can freely edit, whether they are previously populated with an image or not.
But this completely defies my expectations — I can’t edit the new pasted instance, and in fact trying to drag-and-drop to the new pasted snippet only updates the one I copied from. The one I’ve pasted it’s completely immutable — unless you drag to the viewport (not the timeline or storyboard) but then BOTH instances are updated.
In other words, they’re not separate instances, they are linked together. But I would expect them to be a new, separate, independent instance of the snippet.
What am I missing? Is something locked? Why are they tied together?
My workaround is to manually drag out a new snippet for each repeat of this structure, but that’s kind of tedious because I have to manually delete one of the slides since I only want 2 instead of 3, and I want it to have different durations between transitions. Rather than place the snippet, manually delete the slides I don’t want, change the timing on them for each instance I’d much prefer to copy and paste the empty shell and just drag the photos onto it. That simply doesn’t work.
See the screenshot. When I’m dragging to the copied instance — it’s editing the previous one I copied. That makes no sense, unless they’re tied together internally, which still doesn’t make sense. Why would you want to do that by default?
I tried playing around with this, and you are correct. Copying and pasting a set of frames that compose a snippet from the timeline to another location in the timeline behaves exactly how you described. And I agree that it is not intuitive – and it should be fixed.
I did find a workaround, though – but of course that’s just a cludge to make it work. After you paste the copied snippet, select the new associated images (e.g., in the one you show, the "A"s or "B"s or "C"s – or in other words, just the bottom row first). Then do a right-click on that selection, and select Layer > Smart Group (you’ll already see that the Smart Group has a horizontal line next to it). That will remove the Smart Group flag. Then do the same thing again and re-apply the Smart Group flag. That now ties together those layers associated with that copy of the snippet. You’ll have to do the same thing with the next associated images. And do again for each layer used in the snippet. You could also just select ALL of the images/layers in the snippet, do a right-click > Layer > Smart Group (which eliminates the Smart Group flag for everything at once), then go back, select those images associated in a particular layer, and re-assign the Smart Group flag for that layer. As I said, it’s messy – but it does work. There should be a fix for it instead.
