A general comment here if I may,
to thesteved111, the transition can be as long or short as you wish it to be. But, as you've noted from other comments here, the freezing come from using the "cross" effect instead of the "overlap". This has been somewhat of a disappointment for me, as I jumped from Power Director 8 Ultra, right up to PD14 Ultra, When I discovered the option, I thought: "
yeah, this could be useful as it doesn't shorten the length of my overall video(beyond what I chop out)", but in using the cross effect and noting that freeze at the beginning and end of the transition effect, spoiled it for me, so I've now reverted to using the overlap instead. The other disappointment was that if I set "cross" as the default in preferences, the audio component had to be added afterward instead of being added automatically at the same time as the video component of the transition, thus adding to the editing workload for this "little black duck"(quack!).
To Laserdoc, when applying the transition, while it's highlighted, click on "modify". You'll see the choice between cross or overlap there.
For what they're worth, those are my thoughts on the matter of transitions, and for thesteved111, I generally have my transitions at 5 seconds duration, so you can have yours at any length you wish, you can even set your desired length as a default in preferences.
Cheers!
Neil.