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If you've had a camcorder for a while, chances are you've been thinking about using your PC to tidy up your clips ready to share with family and friends, but haven't quite got round to it. Or perhaps you're on the point of buying one of the excellent digital camcorders now available at affordable prices, but find the choice of formats and models mind-boggling. Well, it's all easier than it looks once you've got a few pointers.

Film editors spend years learning their craft and a lifetime perfecting it, but you're not making Apocalypse Now, so you can jump in a bit faster. In fact, the process of video editing can be as simple or as complex as you want. At the most basic, it really isn't hard to chop out the duff bits where the camcorder was shooting the ground while you were walking around thinking you'd pressed Pause, and the result will look so much more professional. Getting slightly more ambitious, your nearest and dearest are guaranteed to appreciate it if you reduce your four-hour holiday video to a 20-minute highlights DVD.

It's true that some people use their first camcorder as a stepping stone to a Hollywood movie career - and if that's your aim, read

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on and go for it. For most of us, though, it's all about cleaning up footage, cutting irrelevant bits out and sticking the rest together, adding titles so everyone knows what they're looking at, and adding music or narration to avoid the home movie cliché of constant background noise. And with any modern camcorder and PC, you can do all this surprisingly well with minimal investment of cash, time or effort.

Editing principles

Video editing is essentially a process of construction. You start with a pile of clips that you've gathered using your camcorder and continue by importing them into your PC, where they can be re-arranged into something worth watching. The end result will depend as much on what you've recorded as how you stitch it all together, but with some basic techniques and the right kit you can achieve professional-looking results quite quickly.

Most camcorders record to tape, but an increasing number save their captured sequences to an internal hard disk drive or a flash memory card, while others record clips directly to a DVD in the camcorder.

As you'll see, the recording format used has a direct impact on the means by which your selected clips find their way onto the PC's hard drive ready to edit and save back to whatever medium you have in mind.

DVD is the obvious output medium these days, and friends without a PC will be able to play the discs in their living room. But it's so much more 2007 to prepare clips that can be posted on your website, sent to a mobile phone or portable video player, or uploaded to a social networking website like YouTube or MySpace. Thanks to some great low-cost (and even no-cost) video software, it's easy to configure your final project in almost any way you choose.