Best Budget Editing Software?

I shot and put together this video quickly in about a day and a half for a competition. Most scenes were done in one take.





I edited it in the only software I had readily available to me; Windows Movie Maker. It's OK, but obviously not professional. I'd like a little more control over certain things, such as the ability to really alter the volume on separate tracks. That was the main problem I had with this project. There is some play in WMM, but not enough.

What can you recommend both for video editing and sound editing? And if anyone is up to giving me any feedback on the video itself, I'm all ears. I'm a freelance photographer and illustrator by trade.

Thanks for your response!

I spent my morning reading about both of those programs. I'm going to download trials of each before I make any decisions.

As to the deck... it was either a ladder on the deck, or crawl up on to the roof. I felt better on the ladder! :)



- Cassandra

Some good suggestions so far...

Since you're apparently a PC user, I'd recommend Adobe Premiere above anything else in the cheaper category; Vegas isn't bad but it's interface seems a bit non-standard to me.

If you've got a Mac around somewhere, get Final Cut Pro.

Also, Avid used to have a free educational version you could download... if you could track that down it would be nice to play with and way better than Movie Maker.

Adobe Premiere is good.
Nero applications also work fine and not so pricey.