What are people using to splice together video and backing music? Bonus points if it is free.

iMovie. Came free with the new laptop.

Rachel

I’m using power director. not sure if I like it but it’s all I have tried. It’s a free trial for 30 days. There are a few annoying things, and it crashed a few times so it’s not a big thumbs up. It did the job though.

If all you want is to put clips together and add backing music, iMovie or Windows Movie Maker are both fine (and one of them is almost certainly installed on your computer already).

We use Premiere for work. It is fabulous for more complicated stuff (synchronising multiple video streams, picture in picture, complicated audio processing etc.) , but a bit complicated if all you want to do is stick clips together with music. Oh and it costs about £800 or something silly.

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-movie-maker?os=winxp

Edius Pro or if you don’t need all the hardware support Edius Neo.
Native AVCHD editing without rendering.
Bit of a steep learning curve but its a good editor.
PC only by the way.
Its not free either.