As the title may suggest, I'm completely new to Video Editing.

I'm currently at uni and have been handed an assignment.

Choose a product, it can be anything, food products, clothing, cars ..etc.. and create an advert, somewhere between 30s and a minute.

I've never edited videos before, and i'm wondering the best (most available / popular ) programs to edit, paying attention to the following:

Ease of Interface - Clipping scenes, arranging in specific orders, size of the video (resolution, or is this determined by my camera?)
Sound effects - Including sound effects and music, voice overs.

I'll be using a Sony DVD101E to shoot all scenes if that helps, but the software provided with it is pretty limited.
http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews72081.html Any help is much appreciated.

Respectfully, you biggest probloem is your choice in camera. Editting from a DVD is never as easy as if it was a miin DV tape camera. Search these forums for detgails on how to translate your recorded DVD into a format you can edit and then search again for ideas/preferences on good software to use for editting. We all have our favourites and tend to recommend the one we use ourselves. Very few of us use more than one editor so very few of use can offer a realistic and constructive comparison. Asusming you are sitting at a PC to read this then worth a play is Woindows Movie maker 2 that comes as standard with Windows XP. It's free.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

As far as the actual video is concerned, what are you interested in? Cars, travel, music, food, sport? Which subject do you feel you know the best and could talk forever about it? That's a good place to start, you then need to watch ads on TV more closely to see that they have a beginning, middle and end. An entire story can be crammed into thirty seconds, with lots of fast cutting between scenes and depending on the subject matter you should get an idea of the kind of music to use, but don't feel that you have to use a continous music track from beginning to end, stings, dialogue, synch sound and sound effects can all be used too. You need to brainstorm, get ideas down on paper and see if you can develop them and change them into images that you could use in your video. This is where storyboarding comes in, just draw little rectangular boxes on a page and if your artistic skills aren't great then just draw stick figures and write underneath what they are doing.

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Better than a poke in the eye with a pointy stick any day...

Thanks for the comments.

I found the software and dug out some software I got free with a magazine a few years back. It's enough for this project atleast. The most important thing is the camera work I reckon.

And yeah, the design process you're talking about it a good idea. It's funny you mentioned that because I done that today, divided a paper into 8 and sketched some thumbnails. However, I've decided not go with that idea.

However now I've got a rough idea of what I can do, I'm going to make a series of videos. Will keep you updated !