New to the DV i/o & video editing

[Woodard_3]

OK, I am a novice when it comes to AV on the desktop, I am a network engineer by day. I am looking for advice on what to buy for my machine. Here is what I want to do. I have a Gateway PIII - 550 with 128RAM the video card is the NVIDIA RIVA TNT AGP card with 16MB RAM. I also have a Sony Hi8 Digital video camera that has a DV i\o fire wire port. I would like to download both stills and full motion video down to my machine for manipulation. Once this is done I would like to take the finished product and record it back down the the Sony Hi8 Digital camera. The manipulation I would like to splice clips out of the video and place these clips in a particular order. I will be getting into effects later, but for now lets just keep it simple. I have been reading through this forum and others for advice and I cannot seem to gather enough information to make a decision. I plan on buying the fire wire cable from Sony. So with that said I need the card to support the IEEE fire wire standard.

And oh BTW can you make any suggestions on the software I will need in order to accomplish this mishion of mine. I am familiar with the Adobe line of products but the price is just out of my budget.

Any thoughts?


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Thanks in advance,
Don