To begin with, you need a few pieces of equipment :
Camcorders / Video Decks
Depending on your requirements or goals, there are many different solutions to discuss, so we will divide them into separate sections.
1. If you are starting from new so we recommend buying a new digital camcorder, this will give you superior video and audio quality, and make getting started in video editing very simple, so ideal for the beginner. There are thousands to choose from catering for various types of budgets.
2. You might already have an old video deck or camcorder using the old analog 
outputs such as composite or S-video (remember to check first what outputs you have). For this type of setup you would use a capture card / analogue to digital converter, this is discussed in more detail further in the article.
A PC for video editing
It is now possible to easily capture footage from your DV camcorder directly to your PC and edit it. If you are looking at buying a new PC or build a new flow then spec's are more than powerful enough for a typical spec PC these days is a P4, 512MB Ram, 80GB HDD, Windows XP or something like that. You can always use your existing PC if you have one, but we would not recommend using anything below a PIII 600th
Additional Hardware
When transferring video from your camcorder to your PC there are some additional things to consider, depending on the type of camcorder your using. If you use a digital camcorder then all your need is a firewire card (also known as a IEE1394 short) has a lot of current PC has these as standard now, otherwise you'll have to buy the card separately. Some of these will be bundled with editing software such as Adobe Premiere, but it really depends on which card you buy and how much you use when your camcorder is connected to your firewire port windows will automatically recognize your digital camcorder. If your using the old analogue camcorder then you will also need an analog to digital converter, see the section on video editing cards below.
Speed?
Its worth considering your Pc's Processor speed, the speed effect the rate your video will encode, encoding is where your DV video clips are converted to a more compressed format, such as DVDs are encoded to MPEG2. So the sooner the better really. Also consider the amount of RAM in your PC, 256Mb would be minimum.
Extra Hard Drive Storage
Its worth considering having an extra dedicated drive for your video recordings, remember that five minutes of DV footage uses 1GB of hard drive space so consider a large capacity hard drive as a 80GB or 120GB, also consider the disk drive RPM, at least 7200RPM would be recommended. If your PC supports it (most new doing now), then a Serial ATA (SATA) drive will offer increased date transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec compared to 100 or 133 offered by the IDE drive, you can also consider a SCSI drive if you're PC has an SCSI adapter as standard.
DVD / CD burners
If your planning on putting your movies on CD-ROM (VCD) or DVD then a CDRW or DVDRW is an essential piece of kit, most new PCs have a CDRW or DVDRW as standard, to burn your DVD, you need DVD authoring software. Video Editing Cards If you have and older analogue video camera / deck then an analogue USB or PCI capture cards will suffice. These dedicated analogue to digital converters take the transition away from the CPU and therefore speeds up transfer. If worth getting a quality capture card as the cheaper cards can produce mixed results
Video Editing Software
This is where all your creative work starts and the creative work starts, you can record video from your camera, edit the captured clips, arrange them in a sequence, add transitions, credits and a soundtrack, titles and when your ready export your movie back to the camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD, VCD, etc.).
