Avid is pretty much like pro tools with alot of video plug ins, made by the same company and Avid actually came first. It is pretty much one of the first non linier video editors and damn near every one out theres interfaces are ripped off from it. An avid rig will run you about 4000 bucks. if you are a beginner (assuming you are if you don't know this stuff) fuck with Adobe Premere and a video interface from pinnicle or some other prosumer company. It is easy to use just have a fast computer with ALOT of ram and a BIG hard drive or 2 because video projects will eat up your hard drive like candy. My old set up at work was a dell presision desktop running premere and DV tools as an importing software. We would use Sony T3 medium format DV cams. Pop the tape into the DV player, burn it to the computer then import the AVIs into premere. then when it was fully edited we would take the exported AVI and put it back into DV tools to a VCR and put them on VHS. It would also be smart to get a DVD authoring software like DVDit (im sure there are better ones out there) since VHS is pretty much dead now.