I started out using Windows Movie Maker II and it's a great free program and like an earlier poster wrote - it's very easy yo use.
In April I was on a liveaboard and had some really interesting conversations with another videographer about editing programs. The DVD's of his work that he brought along on the trip were outstanding.
Upon arrriving home, I started expermenting with Adobe Premiere 6.0 and though I have no doubt that it's an excellent program, the learning curve is way to high for me. I just don't have the time that would be required to learn to use this program.
The other program that I tried was Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6.1. Up to this point, I'm really getting along with this program. Between the tutorial that came with it, another tutorial that I purchased, emails from the fellow I met on the live aboard and webforums, this seems as though it's my program of choice for the moment.
These are the only three programs that I've tried or used, and am likely to use for the time being as this stuff is expensive.
Oh yea, after seeing video edited in better software than WMM II, I knew I wanted something else. WMM really compresses the files to make it fit onto smaller hard drives. If you go to Adobe Premiere or Pinnancle Liquid Edition, plan on purchasing a very large hard drive to captur in .avi. I ended up buying a 250GB HD just for this. But the larger uncompressed .avi is so much better than the very compressed .wmv of WMM II.
NAIBdiver 1