Just a bunch of questions, since I'm starting to graduate from a casual user to a moderately informed user.

1- During my performances, I've always wanted to be able to :
a) at the end of a song, turn off ALL layers and go to black. Currently, I have to go
and manually turn of my layers after each song is done.
b) in the middle of a song, do a quick "fade to black" and then resume play.
If someone could tell me how to achieve these, I would be very grateful.
2- What are the advantages/disadvantages of using memory loading vs. streaming from disk? I'm currently using a Firewire 800 drive to load in my media. Is it better to have all the media play from disk? Would that help the overall performance?
Thank you in advance for all your expert knowledge.
take care;
John