The advice I'm looking for is how you think the cuts look, are they distracting? Are they too sudden, causing an epileptic seizure? As I've watched more and more movies, I've realized that the really good ones do not rely on fades and wipes, but on planning the clips to flow from one to the other. That's my goal.

As for equipment, it's all pretty basic except for a few upgrades:

Sony TRV-240 Digital 8 Handycam
Ikelite underwater housing
Pentium 4, 3.0 Ghz processor
1 gig ram
system drive: ide 160 GB
editing drive: 2 sata 80 GB drives using RAID 0
nVidia 256 MB graphics card
dual monitors
EZ-Keyboard professional (I just wrote a review for this in the review section)
Adobe Premier Pro 1.5
Sonic MyDVD

The video is uploaded as an mpeg, I use my old copy of Pinnacle Studio 9 to compress because I think it does a better job than PPro. I believe it's saved as 460 x 320 at 1000 kbs, but I really don't remember.