Often in a VV3 project I'll leave between 1 & 2 seconds of unwanted material at the beginning and end, rather then trimming the clips exactly. Then before the final render, I'll split the tracks where I want the rendered video to begin and end, muting the unwanted material. When fading in & out to black & silence at each end of the project, I think that this extra padding makes for a more natural fade. For me I've found this the quickest way to accomplish that, plus you can render the entire timeline rather then setting a selection or loop each time you open the project for a render.

It took a while to track down, but if I use this method to create an avi file from VV3, the winmedia 9 Beta encoder seems to choke on it if I try to use it as a source, even though there seems to be nothing at all wrong with the finished clip. A couple of times, before I knew what was happening, re-writing (not rerendering) the avi file using v/dub set to direct stream copy resulted in an avi the encoder would take, but this didn't work everytime.