Just make sure the motherboard on your computer will take new and faster processors. I would get a mini dv camcorder (under £200 now for a basic model), the picture quality is best for standard def video, I would only use the external drive you are thinking of using for backup storage and use the internal drive for capture.

Ideally, you need two internal drives (SATA), one with the OS on it and all your other apps and files, then on the second drive just use it for video capture. Get a firewire socket or PCI card fitted for Firewire, a Firewire cable and off you go. You will need to reqularly defrag the video capture drive to ensure it doesn't result in dropped frames, the bugbear of video capture. Whether you need a graphics card or not is debatable, it might speed rendering up, then again it might not if you use a lot of transitions, effects etc.

If you are looking for some free software to get started, then either download a few 30 day demos of the popular video editors such as Adobe Premiere Elements, or Adobe Premiere Pro or Sony Vegas. Read about them on the various sections of this forum to get a feel of how they work and if they would be suitable for what you want to do. Also on here, checkout the thread I started recently in Forum Announcements News and Off Topic, called Free Stuff! In there you will find a long list of freeware covering a lot of the areas of video capture and editing.

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