transitions between video strips in VSE not working... am I doing something wrong? I've only been working with Blender for a few weeks and my focus at this point is on using the video sequence editor... VSE.

I am running Blender 2.77 on PC with 6 gigs of ram.
I add simple movie to VSE but when I try to add a fade-in from black, nothing happens.  I've tried wipe, cross, gamma cross etc and no joy.  I've been careful to select the video clip and color effect strip in correct order... black first... video second... still nothing.



Also tried soft cut and overlapping video strips to wipe from one to another and the preview screen just goes to black after the wipe.  I'm assuming this is operator error... but did see a reference to a Blender bug in regard to the above.  Please advise and many thanks
At the bottom of the preview window you can select the 'channel' to view. At the moment you have "channel 1" selected. The effect is on "channel 2" so Blender is not showing it to you. 

This is called ch solo'ing, that is: make a strip play in solo (by itself) so you can see it without other effects.

To fix it simply change the channel selection to 0 (zero). This will force Blender to view all channels that have anything on them.