A method and apparatus for representing and editing multimedia compositions

A system for editing and representing multimedia compositions in which the representation of a composition enables a composition to be an arbitrarily deep nesting of assemblies of components. In this representation, relationships between synchronous components may be represented by an array or list. Components which are related sequentially in time are represented by a sequence component, which may be implemented as a tree. For the purpose of improving searching within the tree, a sequence component is implemented as a balanced binary, or 2-3-tree. By using such a representation, searching for a component based on its position in time in the sequence may be performed in logarithmic rather than linear time. Each node in the tree has a corresponding duration, which represents the sum of the durations of any subnodes. Media data for a compsosition is excluded from the representational structures and is merely referred to by such structures. Thus, compositions may be stored separately from the media data.