I'm kind of confused between effects and transitions. Not the technology part so much as the planning part. I am putting together a brief video of some 20-24 short clips. The video is about three and a half minutes long. The clips are of different sections of a trail, with stops to do a brief cleanup.

My first time through, I simply overlapped each short clip by a few seconds and used the wipe transition. Pretty simple, but also the same exact thing every time. Not interesting.

Would I group clips together by a thought or a section of trail? Use an effect between each short clip? Then only do a transition when I go from one section to the next? Or one thought to the next?

I hate to have 2 different questions on one post, but if I want to keep the audio on some clips, but delete audio from other clips - what's the best way of doing that?