I guess I do not know how to amp the wavform in Vegas other than on the track level or envelopes. This will not give me enough 'play' when I tried it because the volume varies tremendously. Is there something that I can do to make the waveforms bigger? Really have not playe ith the audio porion of Vegas all that much, maybe I am missing something??

You could try some kind of Loudness Maximizer plug through the Track Effects or Event Effects depending on how you have it all set-up..
If you have not installed any extra plugs you might try Sony's Wave Hammer - which has a Loudness Maximizer - but if your levels are real low you may need to use its compressor also to get some extra gain - not having used this plug myself I can't say how nice that compressor is going to sound if you really have to lean on it to get the levels you want
Audition doesn't provide some time of gain maximization , normalization or whatever ?

You can make the track the waveform is on bigger. That will increase it's size.

I've done what you're doing in Vegas before and it's pretty easy.

This is what I use Vegas for all the time. I'm presuming your clips are all separate files, so you would want to drop them on the timeline. Then what you can do is right click on the ones that look particularly low in level (low amplitude of the waveform) and choose Switches-->Normalize. This will bring the level up for that whole clip proportional to the loudest peak in the clip. Normalize defaults to -.1dB. Now, you might just want to select all, right click on the audio portion of one of the clips and normalize which will normalize them all. Then you can listen clip by clip and see which ones are too loud relative to others and lower the levels of those clips by dragging the attenutation level down from the top of the audio event. Once you've got relative levels of the clips adjusted, you have to use envelopes to fine tune the levels within the clips, to compensate for louder or softer sections. Then for your final stage you might want to add a compressor to the trck and compress the dynamic range a bit so you have headroom to bring up the over all level of the track if you think it's lacking. You might then want to add a limiter to the Master Bus to protect the levels from clipping - either Wavehammer or Waves L1 or L2 will do the trck. That's usually the last plugin in your chain of processing...

is there more you want to know? EQ also, helps to round out your sound as well, if you need to match environments, presence, bottom, etc. Use automation for that if you're going to leave all the events on one track.

Something to do before you mess with automation: go to the Internal Prefs (hold Shift while clicking on Option-->Preferences and go to eht Internal tab. Type in "default" in the search box and then scroll down towards the bottom of the list of choices and change "Default FX Parameter Automation... Value to 0 instead of 1. This will change the envelope point style to Hold from Linear. This will help enormously when changing Plugin parameter values from one to another. Careful with EQ, though, as this can cause clicks at the point of parameter change. I hope Sony addresses this problem...

good luck and don't hesitate to ask or email more questions.

cdm@cdmstudios.com

Cooldraft, in addition to what is stated above, you can render to a new track, or just simply apply non-realtime FX, which is essentially what you're doing in Audition anyway, except doing it in Vegas means the file stays in place on the timeline, and you'll have Takes that you can swap out if you need to. This is just as easy and lots more efficient in Vegas. I understand you are probably more familiar with CEP/Audition, but might as well keep it "in-house" since you're already working with Vegas. HappyFriar's suggested workflow is a good one.

-shift clicking Options / Prefs is a new one on me with interesting options --
is there any documentation regarding this?
I always like to keep my options open....