Does ripple work across different tracks, for example will it work across multiple video and audio tracks?
If you want it to, it can. There are three ripple-edit modes and one of those (All Tracks, Markers, and Regions) will affect all the tracks in your project. The other two modes (Affected Tracks and Affected Tracks, Bus Tracks, Markers, and Regions) affect any track on which you made an edit, so if you move events that sit on more than one track, each of those tracks is considered an affected track and the ripple applies to each of them.
