kfce: Why Don't My Transitions Work?

If you come from iMovie, you're used to iMovie making transitions by shortening the adjacent shots, taking a bit off each of them to create an overlap for the transition to occur. This incidentally shortens your sequence and possibly pulls things out of alignment with your audio, but that's a problem for iMovie users to deal with.

In FCE and FCP and all other professional editing applications, the overlap is not taken from inside the shot; it's taken from extra material, called handles in FCE, that lie beyond the end of the shot. So if you put a shot in a sequence that uses all the available media for that shot, that is you marked the out point on the very last frame, there are then no handles for the application to extend the shot and create the necessary overlap to make the transition, and the transition will fail.

For the default one second transition you need at least 15 more frames after the marked out point of the outgoing, and 15 more frames in front of, before the marked in point on the incoming shot. That will give you enough material for the default centered on edit, one second cross dissolve or whatever transition you're adding.

All the best,

Tom