All you need to do to get started with video editing and produce quality movies at home are a few simple items. There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than making your own movies and watching them for years to come with your friends and family. Who knows? Maybe your movie may even become a Hollywood hit!

All that you require are a few basic items like a video capture card, editing software, a computer and enough storage space on your computer, a camcorder, VCR or you can even display your movie on your computer screen.

All you have to do now is to capture the video to your computer using a capture card, then edit your video with video editing software and then download the edited video to either a tape or burn it to a VCD, CD or DVD.

The main thing for video editing is a computer. You will need at least a Pentium II 300 or faster, a minimum of 256 Megs of RAM, but you will get better performance with 512 Megs. It is also desirable to have a 30 GB drive that is split into two separate portions i.e. You will have a C; and a D; The C should have at least 10GB as you will have all your software stored there and the D will be where you store your audio, video and editing projects. You should have at least a 32 Meg AGP graphics card. Anything less than 30 will not give you good quality pictures.

Before you begin make sure that you have enough storage space on your computer. You need a lot of storage if you are creating your own DVD. From a single sided 4.7GB DVD you can get around 2 hours of video. But if you are using DV footage then you are going to need 26 GB of storage. But at the last moment you may realize that you have that little extra bit of storage that you need to incorporate into you video so then you need up to 39 GB. And if you adding other options such as graphics, MPEG2 footage for the DVD and the folder to hold it all then you are now up to 50GB. So, for your 2 hour movie you will need at least 50GB of space.

Next we come to the video capture card and the video editing software. You will find many kinds of video capture cards in electronics stores that it leaves you confused which make to buy. Some of the reputed video capture card manufacturers are Pinnacle, Matrox, Dazzle, ADS, Canopus, and Digital Origin.

What exactly do video capture cards do? To put it very simply these cards use hardware or software compression to digitize your video onto the hard drive on your computer. This way you can edit your video and play it back onto tape or display your movie on your computer screen.

You can also buy video capture cards along with video editing software. A few of the more popular video capture cards that are packaged with video software include the Pinnacle Pro One which comes with the Adobe Premiere 6 full version, TitleDeko RT, DV Tools 2.0, Hollywood FX, and Impressions DVD. The Dazzle DV NOW AV can be purchased along with the Premiere 6 full version and the DVDit LE.

What is a movie without music? Well you can add music to your video with a MP3 Converter that will allow you to convert your MP3 music into a wav file or the format in which you need for your video. You can also buy an MP3 Encoder, which will allow you to Wav or other formats into a MP3. A CD ripper is another item that will help converting your CD's to MP3, WAV, WMA type files.

An MPEG Encoder will make your task easier when you start video editing. It is a very easy to use program that will convert several formats easy for you. Most of the MPEG converters will aid in converting DVD, VCD, AVI, MPEG, GIF, Flash, WMV, WMA, WAV, MP3, MP4, M4A, OGG, AAC, 3GP and even more. Now all that's left for you to do is to find the best video editing software available and then you are done. There are several video editing software companies that offer their products on a trial basis.