Dave, I work with various digital editing systems - all PC based. Windows Movie Maker is actually pretty good for what you want to do. It's not the most sophisticated and there are some limitations on effects and transitions, but it gives you decent ability to manipulate clips. It's not designed for multi-track audio editing, but it can handle stereo. It's not included in Win 7 but it's part of XP and can be downloaded in Vista.
Here's a related article:
http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/22658.aspx Thanks to your question, I realized that this computer (64-bit Win 7 OS) doesn't have movie maker so I'm trying to download MM version 2.6 as per the article above. The link in that article is incredibly slow to respond, but this link worked for me:
http://www.soft82.com/download/Windows/Windows_Movie_Maker. That link worked right away and I now have MM on this computer.
Simple tricks 101 (this only took me about 30 minutes to figure out): Want to do a fade up from black to video? Cap your camera and record a few seconds of black - transfer to computer - edit the black file and trim it to 2 seconds. Drop the 2 second file in front of the video, then do a transition between black and video. Same idea for fade to black at the end.
A step up would be Pinnacle Studio softare, which can be purchased packaged with the Pinnacle Dazzle unit. The Dazzle is a pretty slick device - it's an outboard A > D converter which lets you connect S-video or composite video and two audio channels and digitizes them in an outboard device that plugs into a USB port. Pinnacle Studio software lets you store and edit the video, or their DVD Recorder software in the package burns the input directly to DVD while it's playing. The Dazzle unit can often be found on Ebay for under $50. The trick is that the software works best in version 12 and later, but the boxes aren't labeled as to which version comes with the Dazzle. At any rate, I've used it and it has more sophistication than MM. If you go after it, make sure to get a version that has Pinnacle Studio software packaged with the Dazzle - some versions only have the DVD Recorder software.
Here's an example of the right unit:
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=pinnacle+dazzle&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=57502156493755739&ei=lKpIS_3KG86Utgeyu43kDQ&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB4Q8wIwAw#ps-sellersOne other note - the Dazzle does not seem to recognize copy protection. This has allowed me to transfer some old VHS material (at good VHS quality) that I would have lost otherwise. Let's call the resulting DVDs "backups", as I only want one DVD copy anyway. I've transferred a number of laserdiscs and VHS tapes using playback machines with an S-video output. I recently learned how to compress and package these videos for playback on a Blackberry or Sansa View...and even though the resolution of a VHS > DVD transfer isn't great, on a BB size screen it looks great!
Video production is something I do.
