Video Editing Basics
Once upon a time, digital camcorder users wouldn't edit their footage but would keep their shot footage on tapes as is. Today, there are many video editors in the market that allow you to easily  and inexpensively edit your footage and only keep the best memories. These days Windows comes with Movie Maker and Mac OS X  comes with iMovie, installed by default. These two are very simple video editors but if more features are needed, one can purchase Sony Vegas, Ulead Videostudio, Pinnacle, Adobe Premiere or After Effects, Final Cut Express or Studio and many more. Despite the plethora of such software, the basics on how they work remain the same.
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions…
When you load the application, you have two options: either import footage directly from your camcorder, or load a pre-existing video file found on your PC. All the video editors know how to deal with camcorder footage, but you may not be so lucky regarding support of random video files. Sometimes, it is possible to install a freeware utility called "FFDShow" on Windows, or "Perian" and "Flip4Mac" on  the Mac side in order to allow your system to support more video formats.
Once your footage is loaded by your editor, you can start editing. On all editors, you will find either a "timeline" or a "storyboard". These are placeholders where you can drag-n-drop your clips in the order you wish -- as long as clips "touch" each other in the timeline without any gaps. While in the timeline, you can exercise a number of actions upon your clips. The most common action is "split”, where you can chop the clips into different clips and either re-arrange them or discard the parts that you don't like.
Sweet Effects!
 Most video editors support "plugins" or "filters". These are application add-ons that allow you to change the visuals of your clip. For example, you can add a strobe effect, you can make the clip look like old film, you can blur/sharpen, you can change the saturation, white balance, contrast, brightness, and much more. The application with the most available plugins is Adobe's After Effects, with over 1000 such plugins available for free or for a fee. Transitions are another interesting aspect of video editing. Adding a transition effect between two clips can bring a refreshing and spectacular experience to your video -- although it's easy to overdo it. More advanced video applications allow for audio effects as  well, e.g. adding echo, removing wind noise etc.
Possibly the most important editing advice for new videographers would be to never start a video without a fade-in effect, and finish it without a fade-out one. Same goes for the audio. Generally speaking, it is nicer to start the playback by slowly fading into it from a black/silent background, and finish the video by going back to it. It will give a calm feeling to your viewers who would also perceive your video as more professionally made.
Cleaning Things Up
 There are three aspects of video editing that most users are confused about (usually camcorder users). The first one, is "pixel aspect ratios". The reality is that most consumer camcorders don't playback video at the recorded video resolution, e.g. an NTSC widescreen camera records 720x480 pixels, but when it plays back the video is stretched on screen at 874x480 (otherwise the picture looks squashed). Each DV and HDV standard for PAL and NTSC has its own aspect ratio number, so it's important to know what the "playback resolution" is if you want to export your final video for the web. Exporting to a DVD authoring application is not as difficult as the video editor will make sure it exports at the right resolution, however exporting for the web (e.g. YouTube) requires some knowledge on the right exporting resolution for your footage, or you are risking exporting a squashed or too stretched video.
 Another point of confusion is interlacing. Camcorder users might have seen some "horizontal jaggies/lines" on their video and don't know what to do about them. Interlacing is the default recording mode on all consumer camcorders, and users must learn how to export their final video in "progressive" mode in order to get rid of these lines. DVDs are usually interlaced (the DVD player or the TV will perform de-interlacing on the fly so it doesn't matter), but exporting for the PC or the web requires de-interlacing by the video editor while exporting. Some video editors don't offer the "progressive" exporting option for all their video codecs, so you must look around for the best codec that will let you do that.
 The final confusion involves deciding what format users want to export at. "AVI" and "MOV" files are not video formats as most people believe, they are media containers and can "host" inside them many different kinds of audio/video codecs. Because of this, the final rendered file can vary in filesize from 1 MB to 10 GB, depending on the codec used. I would recommend users to look around for "configuring" these containers to export in either DivX/MP3 or XViD/MP3, WMV/WMA or MPEG4 h.264/AAC. These are all "delivery"-grade codecs and are meant for distribution and viewing. M2T, DV AVI, and AIC are what is called "intermediate formats" and they are meant only for archival and editing.
It’s A Wrap:
Be it a DVD, the web/PC, or writing back to the camera's tape, footage that was actually edited will have a much bigger impact to your viewers than just being raw and unedited. Video editing can be frustrating in the beginning, but as time goes by it will make more sense. Go ahead and give it a try!
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