ben i will NEVER get to your level your vids are way nice
Sure you will - I don't do anything particularly difficult, I just play with a bunch of settings as I go 'till it looks nice to me. Thanks for the compliment. One easy thing that makes a world of difference is to fit the music to the video. What I do is start with a target duration in mind. Then I edit down to that duration, and really I have to be quite brutal cutting out stuff that is "OK" but not really worth putting in (even then they still end up at least twice as long as they need to be). Then I go through my entire music library picking out tracks of about the right length, or sometimes I'll have a specific track in mind. If the mood and length of the track fit, you are off to a flying start. Don't believe the music makes a big difference? - take your favourite light wind video (Steve's TrickTail UL one is a good example to use) and then watch it muted while playing some hard dance or rave track. Your brain will struggle with the juxtaposition.
As others have said, it's hard to beat free and WMM is free. There are enough features to let you learn the basics of video editing like splitting clips, adding titles and transitions, capturing stills from video, adding music, basic special effects, video speed, etc.
Once you get that down, providing you "enjoy" spending countless hours sitting at your pc, you can upgrade to a better, full featured video editor.
Top advice there. You should stick with something free and simple until you find yourself unable to make it do what you want. I pretty quicky realised I wanted to do some more advanced stuff (multi-layering, keyframes, audio editing etc) and WMM wouldn't let me do it. So I trawled the web and read up on a bunch of editors which I downloaded the demo versions of. I clicked pretty much instantly with PE7 and so stuck with it. I got it with Photoshop elements 7 in a bundle for about $100. You should be aware though, that the more features an editor has, the more options it gives you and the more time it can take to edit things the way you want them. Of course, you can stick with the basic funcitons of the editor to save time, but then what's the point forking out the extra $ for the features you don't use.
For interest (perhaps), here's roughly how the time goes for me:
Fly and film 'till the batteries go flat giving 90 minutes of footage
Download the footage from the camera and get it into the editor - 30 minutes
Watch it all - 75 minutes (there's usually at least 15 minutes of blank sky to skip through)
Balance the clips for sound and picture (brightness etc) - 10 minutes
Chop up the clips into the good bits and cut out the crap - 180 minutes - gives about 15 minutes of footage
Preview this rough cut and cut another half out - 60 minutes - giving about 7 minutes of footage
Pick out opening and closing scenes - 15 minutes
Design opening title sequence and add closing sequence - 15 minutes
Select soundtrack, edit, balance and sequence with the video (requires more video editing) - 120 minutes
Add transitions - 10 minutes (I generally only use crossfade and dip-to-black)
Add effects - 60 minutes (optional)
Preview final cut - 5 minutes
Make final tweaks - 15 minutes
Render & export - 60 minutes (for standard def - double this for HD)
Check export file - 5 minutes
So for a 5 minute video from an hour and a half of footage, I need to set aside about 11 hours editing time
Bottom line is this - if you want to make nice videos, you need to spend some time on it, and you need to enjoy doing it...
