You spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a video camera. You've shot hours on hours of video on your latest vacation, gigabytes' worth of business meetings, and extended footage of a dozen weddings. Now you have a dusty stack of tapes that are probably-well, boring. What to do with all this footage? You need video-editing software to turn this raw material into compelling videos.

Video editing used to require expensive, specialized equipment and a great deal of knowledge. But today's computers are more than powerful enough to handle the job, disk space is cheap, and DVD burners offer a nearly perfect solution for storing and distributing your finished projects.