Need Suggestions for Movie Editing

[Andrew B.]

Not the usual topic, but maybe someone has dealt with this. We need to process movie files. We receive them as mpegs, but we can request a different format. Once we have them, we need to pull segments from the movies and make a shorter movie. Or, there might be combining of clips from different movies. We will be dealing with hours worth of material. IOW, large file sizes. We want to output to mpeg, but this is flexible if you have a better idea.

My question is, what software should we look into, and what format should we request for the files we receive. The person doing this has no experience with editing movies, so a complex package is not the way to go. But he is a fast learner.

BTW, we were looking into Sony Vegas as a possibility. The Adobe products require Windows XP, and he is running Windows 2000.