Quote: this decreases the length of the two clips being joined

Isn't that the nature of an overlap? To my inexpert mind the alternative is to manually fade out the video and audio of the first clip and then fade back in those of the following one thus preserving the overall length and avoiding an overlap.

Quote: For audio the Cross fades won't do it for me. The overlap fade is what I want, but this decreases the length of the two clips being joined. Is there a way to prevent this?

You should be hearing overlap fades, even with cross. From the PD11 HELP file...

Wow - thanks borgus. Found the note, and figured out what's going on:

In the classic sense, a crossfade is both an overlap and a fading action. Crossfading overlaps two tracks, simultaneously fading them in different directions: the first track is faded down as the second track is faded up. If you're adjoining two audio tracks, and want to crossfade, then during the transition you're going to have audio playing from both tracks at the same time. You need some "expendable" audio.

There are two ways programs (most, that is) deal with this expendable audio:

1. The user pushes two tracks together, and they will sort of mesh, in effect "crossing" over (or into) one another. Some graphics in these programs even go so far as to make it look like two tracks meshing together; each becomes transluscent, and you can basically see one track laid over the other.

2. The user must remove the expendable bit of audio at the beginning of the second track, as well as the expendable audio at the end of the first track. Then, abut the two tracks together, lay the "crossfade" effect across the two, let the software figure out which bits he/she removed, and fade accordingly.

PD11 can't do either of these things. Which is what the help file means when it says, "the cross transition is not supported..."

However, that's not the clearest way to explain this. The cross transition, as the user wants it to be, is not supported. But there IS a cross transition PD11 will do, after compensating for its inability to figure out those "expendable" audio bits -- fading out the first track early, and pulling in the second track far enough to fade it in.

The help file should say, "the cross transition is not a true crossfade," or better yet, "the cross transition will work the way you want it once you've gotten used to constantly unlinking audio/video, moving the audio track a specific measure to the right, programming a predefined amount of extra time into the beginning of the audio track, adding that same amount to the end of the preceding audio track..."

Major disappointment here.

Quote: In the classic sense, a crossfade is both an overlap and a fading action. You need some "expendable" audio.

You can play around with this audio crossfade concept...

First, unlink the audio.

Drag the TO audio clip down to another audio track.

Place the pointer on that track's IN point - a two-headed arrow appears - and drag left to match up with the start of the video fade.
Place the pointer on the FROM audio clip's OUT point and drag it right to the end of the video fade.

Set keyframes for the fade IN/OUT in the respective tracks. Drag the horizontal audio line. A red dot is shown as they're set.

The overlap created by the overlap would still shorten the overall duration though.

Quote: The overlap created by the overlap would still shorten the overall duration though.

Not as I see it. Video length is unchanged - a crossfade.

In the illustration above fifteen frames of "expendable" audio (as you put it) have been added to both the end of the FROM and beginning of the TO clip so that audio length/positioning are similarly maintained - provided, of course, that the extra audio is available to cover the transition duration of 1:00.

In essence, this creates an old film-style A/B roll for audio.

That's exactly what I went to as option 2, right after posting my lengthy response above, borgus. It does emulate a proper crossfade, but of course inconvenient having to unlink and lock/unlock.

Thanks!