It may sound juvenile to some, but that's what I have been doing. I imported a stereo music track (WAV). Preprocessing in Audacity. Created title pages in my graphics program. They are static images but interesting with multiple layers. I then combined multiple video clips with "quick transitions". I have to admit I'm still heavy handed with trimming, I need to practice using the keyboard for that.

Here's the new part for me. "Cue" marks. I read how to set it up in the user guide. I added the stroke 'q' to the key definitions. It's nice that I can cue on the fly. As you can imagine, finding key points in the music is somewhat monotonous. With cue on the fly, an incidental moment that catches my attention can be marked for later. Excess marks can easily be removed.

I am adding the slides using the image key effects. The effect allows a lot of flexibility in slide presentation. I will go as far to say it forces creativity out of me.

With my old machine, I find it necessary to render the effects fairly frequently. The machine has a tendency to bog down and get glitchy when too many effects are in play. I can still go back and reconfigure or remove the effects.

Since the AVI files don't work right after import, I've adopted different preprocessing workflows. I cut the clips inside lwks. I don't care to do that because it seems like a lot of overhead just to cut clips. I don't have a total grasp of what filters and such lwks can do. I find that once I get my material into lwks, the program performs like a champion. It can definitely take more than I can throw at it.