"Once I had all the commercials removed, I went back and added Fade-in/outs to all new unions by overlapping the segments "

It's sounds like you know what you're doing, and I'm sure Chien knows what he's doing, but I'll offer this response anyway...

When you overlapped the segments, did you do this by actually moving the entire second segment so it partially overlapped the first? Or did you grab the end of the first segment and drag it out to the right to overlap the second? (Or, similarly, drag the beginning of the second segment so it overlapped the first.)

If you dragged the end (or beginning) of one of the clips to create the overlap, you would have added back in the frames you carefully deleted. However, you would probably see the commercial frames when you previewed on the PC.

Another thing that comes to mind: when you stepped frame-by-frame to locate the first frame of the commercial, are you sure you were zoomed in enough to get individual frames? If zoomed out a little bit on the timeline, what looks like stepping a frame at a time might actually be stepping 3 or 4 frames at a time. You can always do ALT-right-arrow (or is it CTRL-right-arrow?) at any zoom level to step one frame at a time.

Also, the real-time preview on the computer -- especially before rendering -- often skips frames when previewing transitions (depending on your computer speed, of course). It tries to keep up with real-time playback speed, and may have to skip frames in order to stay on schedule. Could explain why you didn't see the frames in the preview.

Again, you sound like you really know what you're doing, but that's just a few things that come to mind.

Tim L

Thanks for the "...sounds like you know what you're doing" comment but really I'm still new to this process and just trying to learn.

Looking back on my lapping methods, I believe I did it all the ways you mentioned and did not consistently utilize any one method. In fact, I am positive that on more than one occasion, I did grab just the end of a segment and drag it over and or perhaps more precisely, I grabbed the whole segment and placed it roughly where I thought it should go and then tweaked its position by grabbing the very end to either expand or contract it.

While I try not to assume anything, would it be safe to assume in this case that had I not grabbed the very end's of any of the segments, I likely would have not added back in those segments of commercials that I thought I had removed?

Are there any limits with regard to length of lap area for any given lap such that adverse problems might be experienced, i.e.; snippets of frames once removed, reappearing? ...that is if I don't create these laps by grabbing the ends of them?

While I feel somewhat certain I was drilled all the way in and stepping frame-by-frame, I didn't know of the keyboard/arrow trick so I'll be certain to try this the next time.

I like your explanation regarding my PC's ability, or lack there of, to keep up with real-time previews. If my end-grabbing methods resulted in adding back in only a few snippets of a once removed commercial, then skipping frames during preview playback certainly seems plausible to me.

Thank you very much for your help, much appreciated.

I have seen cases of junk I know I removed showing up, but I saw it during the preview (something got way confused in VMS that day; there was stuff from events I had completely removed from the track).

Now that you know what to look for you could go back, pull the events apart (get rid of the overlap), and examine the first/last frames in those events to see if you had stretched the events too far. There is a chance that will put your mind at ease (or make you more frustrated, but let's be optimistic here...).