Ok. Bear with me here...

I'm doing a documentary... because a documentary needs to be done about a particular subject, but nobody's doing it... so I've taken on the burden of this task. The problem is that... while I have lots of computer experience, I don't have much A/V experience.

I'll need a digital video camera (money isn't a big deal, but I don't want to go over $3k)... if anyone could forward me to a [populated] forum that discusses those, I'd appreciate it.

That said, I'll need editing software on my computer, and I'm sure a few of you could help with that.

Can somebody tell me what the differences are between all of these programs (Priemiere, Elements, After Effects, Ulead, etc.)? I know they have similarities, but I doubt Adobe has 3 copies of the same program, so if you could explain them a bit, I'd appreciate it. :p

I definitely need to be able to:
- edit on a frame-by-frame basis
- zoom on still images and across frames on actively running video (how is this done? keyframes?)
- use layers, add [animated/moving] text, apply masks

So I'm sure these are somewhat common functionalities of video-editing software, but I downloaded a trial of Ulead, which is now expired, and I pretty much didn't notice anything that gave me the ability to do any of these things. Just seemed like a program that allowed me to crop and merge video segments, but then again, I only tinkered with it for about 5 minutes.

By the way, I'm under the impression that if I want to create a 3-d video... as in... with models, textures, etc. (a 3-d, computer-generated simulation), none of the aforementioned programs will do that, right? I need something along the lines of 3d Studio Max for that and then I take the video it generates and bring it into video-editing software, right?

Thanks in advance.