Also take some time to sit back, reflect, and ask yourself, "does it really matter? will anyone care or even notice if some of them are off by a few frames? or is it more important that i concentrate on making this look good?" It's a good excercise habit to get into concerning almost every phase of the creative process.

Go to Options > Preferences > Editing and locate the "Cut to Overlap Amount" setting. The value you type here will create a "snap" point when you overlap two clips.

You might also need to zoom in on your timeline to get finer control of your placement.

Why is this called "convert cut to overlap"? Because you can butt two clips up against each other -- which technically is a "cut" -- then put your cursor in between the clips and press "/" on the numeric keypad, and VMS will convert that cut to a crossfade by extending the events as needed to create the specified overlap. Hence the other nearby setting, which describes whether the new overlap should be centered at the cut, or before or after, etc.

But, its still usually easier to just slide one clip over top of the other and have them snap at the desired amount.

Also, you can freely change this value as you edit. Say for part of your project you want 2-second crossfades. Set the cut-to-overlap to 2.0 seconds. Later, in another part, you want faster 1-second crossfades. Go back to Options > Preferences > Cut to Overlap and change the amount to 1.0 sec. Your original 2 second crossfades are unaffected, but new ones will snap at 1 second overlap now.

Tim L

"But, its still usually easier to just slide one clip over top of the other and have them snap at the desired amount."

thanx for proving me wrong on that. a very neat feature. i did notice however that if you opted for using the '/' button, it seems only the video track is affected even if the video and audio tracks are grouped. but the snapping while dragging is great.

"Is there a way in Sony Vegas 6.0 to set crossfades more precisely? I use CTRL and the arrow keys to move in small increments but it seems they change every few seconds then when they get to 1/2 second or 1 1/2 second, they jump from that point to the next whole second. "

After you begin dragging one event over the other, press and hold SHIFT. I've found this will get rid of the "snapping" effect and allow you to gain super-control over the amount of overlap, down to the frame.

Unless I'm not understanding your directions clearly, even if I use SHIFT, the cross fade still uses 4 second increments until it gets up near 1.5 seconds then jumps up to 2 seconds.

Another member said it really doesn't matter and that's correct - it's really not that big of a deal but just a little thing I've noticed that I'd like to figure out.

Thanks.

Holding the shift key down means the increments should be single frames. The only problem i can think of is that you're zoomed out so far that each pixel is a few seconds wide. You might want to zoom in a bit to get finer control with the mouse movements.