Hi Guys

I have a loan of a sony digital video camera with iLink connector. My PC is a 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, 64MB Nvidia card and soundblaster live value card. And XP home.

Ok... will this cope with video editing? What software should I get to transfer video to HD, edit it, add soundtrack and write to VCD/DVD? Adobe Premier?

I do my video editing on a lesser PC than yours.
I have tried lots of software out there, but my absolute favorite is Pinnacle Studio (currently V8). www.pinnaclesys.com
It will let you pull the video out of your firewire port, overlay all the sounds you could want and write it out to VCD/DVD etc.

Personally, I love the timeline type interface which I find to be very logical.
The other good feature is the music overlay which will add music to exactly fit the length of video, complete with start and finish.
The selection of wipe and fades etc is also really good.

No demo to DL??? Damn them! I tried Studio7 as well as other vendors products and many weren't all that good. I'd like to try it before I throw them $100.
The problem I would get is the first piece of video captured was fine, then the second part (same tape, same capture, just a pause in the original video recording) the audio would be so choppy it was imnpossible to listen to.
I use a P4 1.5Ghz, 1Gb RAM, Firewire capture, etc. What quality settings do you typically use for capture? I haven't messed with the capture for a while, and I never got any useful help at vcdhelp.com.

edit
I just found the demo, it's 225MB, so it's snail mail a CD or long DL..

I have a big hard disk so I usually capture at full resolution with Studio 7, although you can capture at preview quality first. I usualy let it figure out the scene changes itself.
The last one I captured at preview, then wrote it out to VCR with my DC10plus (another pinnacle product).

My system is a AMD 1.2TB, 512M ram firewire capture, Canon ZR20. Never had any problems like stuttering etc.

Well, 40GB should be plenty, depending on how much of that is actually free.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite get how you were going to connect it via hardware. Is the "iLink connector" some sort of PC interface? On my dad's sony I seem to remember it just being something that could send the audio/video signals over IR to the TV.

Anyway, I've been uing Premiere, and it's a very powerful program, but not user-friendly IMO. Then again, I don't think any Adobe products are. So yeah, that's it. After that I think Nero has a VCD burning tool.

Is the "iLink connector" some sort of PC interface?

I believe iLink is what Sony calls firewire.

EDIT: Confirmed

iLink is the small Firewire connector. I downloaded a few demos and will mess about with some programs to see what I like!

Well, if your CPU and memory isn't up to the task then the rest of us are screwed

Required HD space is totally subjective. 40GB is fine for editing, but if you intend to edit a lot of video, and to keep it all around, then eventually it will fill up.

Stictly, iLink is a slight modification of the Firewire Spec. But it's not important, It'll do everything.
I've done a small amount of video editing on a P!!! 800, TNT2, 32MB RAM, 20 GB HDD. Worked fine but full res playback had some very slight stutters occationally.
Your system should cope really well as long as it runs smoothly already.

Adobe Premier is very good, capturing the vision can be a pain compared to consumer stuff. iMovie is great at this. It starts a new clip when the scene changes. That is, when you stopped recording at one point and restarted, it detects the index mark and starts a new clip. I don't know what other packages do this as it's a great time saver. Set your editor to capture and sit back. Premier still requires you to mark out the regions you want captured. You can create a batch to get them but it adds about triple the amount of time you want to capture.
I don't know which packages, if any, have the auto-capture function of iMovie. (Anyone?)

Having all your images on a separate disk is good if you can take advantage of bus speeds and so-on. Mostly, you should be fine though.

Video editing is really rewarding though. Have fun with it!