Good video editing software for a noob?
 

I've never done any video editing before, but my brothers snagging one of those little suction-cup mount cameras and I'd like to do some basic editing and effects.

Free software is best but I don't mind shelling out some coin for something with an easy learning curve but isn't uber basic

Mac or PC? iMovie is incredibly easy to use. And should've come with your Mac if you have it.

I'm not too well-versed on PC editing suites - Premiere gave me headaches there, but I bet the Elements version should be quite good and still easy to use.

Get Premiere and buy the lessons at Lynda.com

It is super easy to learn basic editing and make pretty nice videos with cuts, b-roll, music, etc.

I tried diving head-first into Premiere once years ago and got lost in 5 minutes... fired up Final Cut Pro on a Mac and was rolling right away.

If you don't have a Mac, take a look at Sony Vegas - very nice to use, some nice features... I like it a lot better than Premiere.

Of course, you can always just use Windows Movie Maker to start with, too.

im using sony vegas. for the most part, it's fairly simple to use. after playing around with it for a bit, i got accustomed to it pretty quick. some of the stuff i couldn't figure out, i just youtubed.

I'll echo the sentiments about Vegas. It's a really simply program to use if you're unfamiliar with video editing. Premiere is definitely trickier, but once you learn the basics it all starts to flow together pretty easily.

thanks guys, this is for XP. I'll look into all of those a bit more tonight :)