What you're asking for with the punch-in, punch-out is the trimmer tool, which is designed to do exactly this. You load your original video into the trimmer, highlight the section you want, and then move that section to the timeline. Move on to the next section and repeat.

That being said, i never use the trimmer. I always do my editing right on the timeline. Perhaps that's because the idea of the trimmer works best when you want small sections out of a lot of source material, whereas i generally only want to get rid of small sections and keep the bulk. Still though, either way, it's a lot easier than what you've been doing. The following all apply to making cuts on the timeline, rather than the trimmer.

Make sure Auto-ripple is on, as Cin mentions. Also make sure that you do NOT have 'ignore event grouping' enabled, as this is the most likely reason you have to select the audio and video instead of them both being selected. Both of these are icons right above the timeline ruler and familiarizing yourself with them will speed up your editing a lot. With these two options enabled, you can simply highlight the section you want to get rid of and press the Del key on the keyboard. That's it, just those two quick steps and the edit is done. If your audio is from a separate file than the camera audio then you have to make sure you don't have one track selected and not the other, as in this case the operations only affect the selected track. Shift-Ctrl-A removes all selections and is often a good idea for starting these operations with a 'clean slate', as it were.

Now, how you highlight is mostly up to whatever is convenient to you. It's not necessary to use markers, but if that's what you prefer then you can simply double-click between the two markers to select that section. Press Del and it's gone.

I tend to drag the mouse along and watch the preview window until i see the frame i want, then let up on the mouse button. This works even after-the-fact, as in you can drag the end of an already existing selection to change it. You can drag to make a rough selection, then zoom in to make fine adjustments. Press Del and it's gone.

If i'm making a larger selection across a much longer piece of the material i'll use the i and o keys to set in and out points. Find the start of the section you want to highlight and press i, then find the end of the section and press o. This is similar to the markers approach, but simpler, and doesn't leave you with spurious markers to clean up afterward. Press Del and it's gone.

Vegas gives you lots of different ways to do things. Play around to find what way works easiest for you.

+1 for editing in the timeline with auto-ripple on. Save often using Save As with incrementing project version numbers.

One thing I do when editing multi-cam shoots is to play the video at 2x or 3x rate (the slider at the bottom left corner) and press S (split) for out then in points to the end of the video. Go back and delete every other event. This gives me a "rough cut." I then drag the leading or trailing edges of each remaining event to fine tune the out/in points. You could prolly try something similar to this.

With auto-ripple on when you drag the forward edge of an event left, it will look like it's overlapping the previous event on the timeline but as soon as you release the mouse it will jump right. When dragging the trailing edge of an event, it will overlap the next event but when releasing the trailing event will jump to the trailing edge of the event you just extended. Do it a few times and you'll get the hang of it.

+1 for editing in the Trimmer, especially with Auto Ripple on.

Richard

Thanks for these replies. Many areas mentioned I'm not familiar with so that's encouraging. I'm looking forward to trying it in the next days.