Usually the audio for a scene will end at the same time as the video and the resulting clip ends neatly. But sometimes the audio runs on a little into the next scene, and cutting at the end of the video can leave a speech in mid-word or music in mid-bar. Similar things can happen at the beginning of a scene. The effect is irritating and messy, and it's possible to tidy it up.
Tidying the end
If the problem is at the end of the clip it's very easy to fix. Rip the original clip with a few seconds of slack on the end. Load it into VirtualDub and snip off the end of the clip bit by bit until the sound finishes neatly, never mind about the pictures.
Now you can get rid of the unwanted picture frames by masking. Make a selection starting with the first frame you don't want, and ending with the end of the clip. Go to the Edit menu and select Mask selected frames. Masked frames (labelled with an [M] on the timeline) will not appear when the video plays, instead the last frame displayed freezes. You can now save the clip using Direct mode for both audio and video.
Tidying the start
The same thing can be done at the beginning of the clip, but it's a bit trickier. The main problem is that the first frame is displayed whether you mask it or not. Furthermore, the same editing caveats apply as if you were deleting the frames instead of masking them: Full processing mode + Smart rendering should be enabled.
It's possible to get rid of the frozen first frame of Clip A by finding a silent clip with blank video in the exact same format, Clip B. You can always extract one of these from a piece of "dead air" on a feature film or similar. Load Clip B afresh and append Clip A. Now you can delete all but the first frame of Clip B, mask all the other frames of Clip A you don't want to see, and save the result.
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