There are a number of great video editing tools available for both the PC and the Mac.

On the PC, my favorite is Sony Vegas. It does just about everything you need and it’s very affordable. It handles HD video and audio production tasks with ease and produces professional level video. It’s easy to use and learn. It has wizards to import and export projects so that you can get started quickly.

The program is chock full of Show Me How interactive tutorials that help you learn to use the software quickly. The Show Me How tutorials make it easy to complete a project step-by-step.

On the Mac, the king of video production software is Final Cut. It’s kind of expensive, but it’s great software if you are really serious about producing the highest quality video.

If you are interested in making a screen cast, you will need the right software to make it work. I have tried free software for this and it will work. The trouble is the free software is harder to use and produces much poorer quality results.

My strong recommendation for anyone who wants to make a screen cast is to use a software tool called Camtasia Studio. It’s easy to use, it works great and it will save you lots and lots of time. The price is about $300, but it’s really worth it. If you can’t afford that and you have lots of time to work on this, then you can try the free software option CamStudio. Camtasia and CamStudio are NOT the same thing. They totally different products.

If you want a great looking screen cast I strongly recommend Camtasia (aff). It gives you all the tools you need to capture the screen cast with audio, edit the end result so it looks the way you want it and then encodes the files to be used in just about any format you will need.

Here’s a video of Camtasia in action: