try sonic foundry/sony vegas (sony bought vegas from sonic foundry). it's faster than most softwares based from my experience. windows movie maker is for you if you're doing this for the first time. i don't think you need a tv tuner necessarily since you have a digital device (mini dv) already. u can have either usb or firewire (transfers much faster than usb) whichever your hardware (your pc and your videocam) supports. also, prepare the cd that came with your videocam because the pc may not recognize the device. and last but not least, you should have a large hard drive so that the movie will fit. size depends on how long the movie is.
Last edited by umzzzzz; April 5th, 2006 at 04:15 PM.