i am trying to assess the costs of beginning a project in DV production. i was wondering, with no allusions to budget, could anyone let me know what hardware/software (besides a camera and computer, of course) i would need to effectively edit my DV recordings? If you could, i would appreciate several different package recommendations. what do you use? what would you rather be using? what are the benefits and disadvantages of each? i know this is a lot of information to request, but any bit of 411 would be immeasurably appreciated.

wonderful forum, by the way

oh, right. i am leaning towards feature films, not documentaries and so on...if that has any bearing

Bare minimum for video editing?
P3-800mhz
256mb ram
13gb hard drive space per hour of DV
Firewire capture card.

I just bought this system about 2 weeks ago for multipurpose editing.
P4-2ghz
512mg ram
40gb system drive
80gb data drive
ATI 9000 dual monitor video card
ADS Firewire card
(and the other typical stuff, cd burner, floppy drive...)
2 19" flat screen trinitron monitor
plus Vegas Video 3
for a total of about $2300us after taxes, give or take

As far as NLEs go, I could have bought Avid Xpress DV (actually I could have pirated it free, but nevermind that), but I chose Vegas since itseemed to get great reviews over Premiere. I just didn't want to go through the learning curve of Avid, yet. And software pirating is wrong!
My alternate choice to Vegas was the Matrox RTX100 real time card, but I decided I didn't really need it's real time features for the extra price over Vegas, for the type of editing I'm doing. No snazzy 3-d graphics, just straight forward cutting and simple effects/filters. ANd flawless, stable operation.

Hope this helped.

yes, actually, it helped tremendously. (pirateing is wrong? i guess i should return psp 7.0 and ulead jif animator...nah. concsience, be damned) and the price, around $2300US for your system, is the best news i've had in quite some time.

the pirateing thing was a joke, of course

thank you very much for your consideration

Pirating IS wrong. It IS theft. Just like downloading/ripping MP3's is wrong. People work hard to put that stuff out there. How would you feel if someone was making copies of a movie you put your life savings and a year of work into and were distributing them for free to the point it cut your sales in half? I'd be pretty pissed, myself.

Unless it's Microsoft software, then it's OK. ;)

I don't hold pirating software against anyone, since we've all done it at some point in time.