Hello and thanks for reading this. I continue to encounter jerky and uneven results when assembling real estate ad videos.
I want smooth transitions from clip to clip, both stylistically (seques) and technically (nice cross-fades). I'm close to good style results, however the technical results are not so good. I have not discovered anything in the tutorials that gets to the problems I am seeing. Most of the tutorials address the basics, but not the issues I am having, so far as I have found.

I am using a Lenovo P70 with typically more than 40GB free space.

Here's my current routine. Maybe some of you can point out some things that I am doing that while they make sense to me, may be unfortunate actions with PowerDirector15.

I have a variety of clips with scenes shot with a drone. In post I often want to reverse some clips for a nicer seque. Sometimes I want to speed up a clip. Sometimes slow one down. I typically like to use a basic Fade from one clip to the next. I also find that the fade effect is too long for my tastes, so I try to shorten the default fade length using the visual UI (click and drag to shorten).

Problems seen: a) an odd and annoying little bump in the video just after a fade. b) jerkiness from frame to frame in a clip that has been slowed down or reversed.

There are more problems when I attempt to sync to the beat of a soundtrack. Sometimes there are "more than 25" which freezes my laptop when Wave Editor opens, a technical problem I have reported to Cyberlink (not resolved yet, however I have not done all of the suggested fixes yet). After I delete some of the beat markers, I now have a challenge of what is the best way to "stretch" or "shorten" one clip after another from start to finish of the video to match the nearest beat markers to the junction of two clips. This is more difficult if attempted after applying the (cross) Fade effect.

Sometimes I appear to "get lucky" and a transition works like it should. Other times not. More not than should, lately. I must have fallen in to an unfortunate routine when using PD15.

I'm open to suggestions, as the song goes. There's probably a sequence of Best Practices that would avoid the problems I an experiencing. What appears like it should work, does not, or not well. What I see is not always what I get.

Thanks for reading.