Camcorder Editing Software

Hi all,
It is slightly off topic but it is a small bit related!!!
I am semi-pro photographer and shoot most of my work on digital. This summer I went to Kenya to do charity work for the Friends of Londiani charity. Check out http://www.friendsoflonidian.com for more details. It was a fantastic experience.

I brought several cameras with me but also I was asked by my mother to buy a camcorder and film a video diary. I bought a Canon Mini Dv video MD160 amatuer video and filmed the trip reasonable well. I always imagined videoing would be easier thou!!

Anyway, I am now left with 8 hours of footage. I was wondering what is the best way to edit it. I would purchase software if I knew it was worth it for my video editing.(Up to $100 aprox) I want to cut music from the tape and put it as background at different scenes etc.... I also want to add music and my photos and create DVD's etc.....I noticed it uses even bigger memory than photos....I want to create the DVD's as straight forward as possible but realise there is a serious amount of cutting and pasting to be done!!

Any recommendations would be apprecaited...
thanks in advance,
Tom

You may or may not have tried the windows moviemaker in xp and vista.

I have a PC.
Last night I downloaded one of the films and used the windows movie maker to edit the film. I managed to edit the film but I noticed that the file size was drastically reduced. I want to burn a DVD afterewards and I want the file quality to good enough for a large TV. why did the quality/file size drop so dramatically. I am currently downloading the film on to my computer at the largest file size. Is this necessary? Would I be better using a smaller quality format to download.
Any tips on this would be appreicated.
Liam