Advice on free video editing software

[Buckethead]

Windows movie maker allows you to record with your webcam. Not sure if it can also add sound. Outputting as AVI should be pretty much standard.

[Babar]

You can add sound with Window's Movie Maker, and double the speed, and Youtube allows uploading of a wmv file (which I think is all that Window's Movie Maker can output). I didn't know about the webcam thing, though.

[Lionmonkey]

Does it still crash every hour or so?

Yes, it does. And the sizes of final video are always too big. I've once got a 1:14 minute video, which weighted 10 Gb.

[InCreator]

I've once got a 1:14 minute video, which weighted 10 Gb.

And this depends on program HOW?
Sounds more like you don't have a clue what the codecs are or why are they invented.

Vegas saves a  strange thing with .sfk extension (into My Documents by default), which doubles as clip and which I believe is copy of the clip in Vegas with changes within the project - in its native format or something. If you do lot of video editing and forget to erase .sfk-s of completed projects, indeed, it will fill up your HD.

But so does rendering your movies uncompressed. Jeesh!

If you capture something, it indeed comes initially in uncompressed format. It's perfecty normal, and GOOD.

For a quality video edition, I really don't see why it should be anyway else, since uncompressed = lossless = top quality. Some cameras (especially cellphones or photocameras able to record video) automatically compress the video during recording, but MiniDV cameras, AFAIK, don't try to spoil quality (reduce size) by themselves.

So, right way to do this is capture video from your camera uncompressed into computer, make edits, and then render with some codec. Like DivX or XVid or any other popular codec. 1:14 minute video could be 10GB only on either uncompressed, ultrahigh resolution, very badly packed (low compression) or with a really strange codec. This has nothing to do with the software you used to capture. This could be entire educational thread, but there's tons of similar forums and resources out there. Just Google.

[Kinoko]

I'm using Vista, I'm afraid, and:

The HD version in Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista adds support for capturing from HDV camcorders. The capture wizard will create DVR-MS type files from HDV tapes. However, the Windows Vista version of Windows Movie Maker no longer supports importing video from an analog video source such as a VCR or from a webcam.