And I’m learning to do this stuff too! My first edited video should be coming out this week! 🙂

Here’s how I do it (ok, mostly did it in the past, since I haven’t done it in a while now, I’m mostly a photo-guy now):

– I grab the movie from the camera using Scenalyzer. What that does is split each scene (every time you start/stop the camera) into separate files, which really makes it much easier to process later on. It’s not that expensive and works great.

– Cut and cut, etc. I haven’t found the best tool for that, I’ve tried lots of tools, some are easy (but limited), others are not so limited (but complicated). Sigh.

– When I’m done with processing I compress the video to the size and quality I need. I have used Windows Media formats but also DIVX (or xvid) with mp3 audio, both can be used to get the size down nicely. Youtube has recommendations at http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55745
I found a neat tool that can convert existing videos (provided you have the codecs) to other formats and sizes, but I don’t have the link here…

I generally convert my “family videos” to something like TV quality and keep those versions. I do however also keep the original tapes so that if I need to, I can go back and re-do the videos at a higher quality. If you compress the videos before you start cutting, the quality really goes down quickly… keep a lot of storage free when working on videos, unless you just want a 1:1 copy 🙂