Key, keyframing this sort of thing leads to nightmares when you have to make adjustments later on.

With splits, if you decide to change the length of a section, simply drag it's edge to the new time, and then the edge of the other event it was touching too. With automatic timeline snapping this is a breeze. With keyframes it would be a lot of work.

Only other refinement i would add is that if you tend to duplicate the effects across more than one section you could move the split sections into separate tracks, keeping all the ones with the same effect on the same track. Add the effects at the track level instead of the event level. You can still individually tweak effects on events if you need to, as effects on track and event levels are additive rather than exclusive.

Thanks for both of these replies. It seemed like a tedious process which I'm willing to do but if there was a simpler way I would have liked to hear about it beforehand. I have to get this "automatic timeline snapping" investigated as I'm not familiar with that. I will be using the same effect quite often and wouldn't mind pulling down a bunch of segments but would be nervous about inadvertently moving one of them and getting out of sync. I suspect this timeline snapping would prevent that?

Not prevent, but it would help. For moving events up and down the tracks try using the 2 and 8 keys on the numeric keypad. These guarantee precise vertical movement with no horizontal movement. Just make sure you have the destination tracks already created on the timeline, as Vegas won't use this method to move to a non-existing track.

Snapping: i'm not sure how limited the Studio version is. In Vegas Pro, under Options there are several for snapping: to grid, to markers, to all events. Movie Studio may not have all of those, or it may not let you toggle them independently, or just maybe it does have all of that feature (i haven't used or seen the Studio version since version 3). With it enabled as you move events around they will tend to "jump" into alignment with other things as they get close. This makes it very easy to keep things aligned.

As far as the tedium is concerned, welcome to the world of actual editing. Yes, there are some programs that take over and do all this for you, but the cost is that you end up not being able to precisely control what you want. Since you want to pick a specific effect for each section of the video, you need to expect to do that work for each section. That's the price you pay for artistic control of the process. At least if you're repeating effects you can do it by track to save yourself the effort there.