After you've shot hours of digital video, what do you do next? The first step to creating a great home movie is to explore what you'll need to edit your raw digital video.
What kind of computer should you have for editing video footage?
What other equipment do you need? Use the following checklist as a guide.

• A desktop PC with at least a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 or a 2.17GHz Athlon XP 3000+ processor
• 512MB to 1GB of memory
• Lots of free drive space (43 minutes of video at 720x480 in AVI format can easily chew up 60GB of memory)
• A DVD burner
• A capture card if your video is in analogue format
• A FireWire port if you'll be using a DV camcorder or a USB 2.0 port if your camcorder records in MPEG-2 format
• A FireWire cable if you'll be using a DV camcorder
• A good monitor with a resolution of at least 1,024+ù768
• Video editing software

Take some time to assess what you already have and what you need to get. If you need a video-capture device (you're using an analogue video source), the installation will vary widely depending on the type you choose: external USB, internal PCI, or as part of a combination graphics card that uses AGP.

After you've installed it according to the manufacturer's instructions, the next step is to install the software.
The toughest challenge during installation is designating which country you're in so that the program will know which video format you'll be using. (NTSC is the format used in the United States.)

Windows Media Player, when used with Internet Explorer, will play a sample of a downloaded mpeg file until the whole file has been downloaded. This can be disruptive for the viewer and does not happen with Windows Media Viewer (WMV) files.
Most video cameras produce output as mpeg or avi. A very good conversion tool that is also free is Super ©. Download Super © here.