Digital video capture and editing tools

iFilmEdit from Cinax is a nice little tool for cropping and concatenating MPEG-1 bitstreams. It's inexpensive at about $US45, runs on Windows 95, can be tried out before you pay for it and is fairly intuitive to use.
iFilmEdit has a player and recorder window, and editing is achieved by in-and-out-point marking and drag-and-drop.
Like most editing tools for MPEG, it suffers from the need to copy and process the bitstreams before it can do the editing, which for a one hour movie can lead to a wait of about 10 minutes or so, and chew up lots of disk-space because at some point in the process there are the originals, a large temporary file, and the final joined copy of the bitstream. If you don't make allowance for the extra space taken up by the final copy and the temporary file, you run out of disk-space, and on our test system at least, this crashes the program.

Avid MCXpress nonlinear editing system for Mac and NT
This is a professional software tool for video editing.
Avid's White Paper on how to choose a non-linear video editing system

Summary

Requires a video capture board.
Imports and exports MPEG-1, Quicktime (on MAC) and AVI (on NT) digital videos.
Captures up to 30 frames/sec NTSC (720x486 or 640x480) or 25 frames/sec PAL (720x576 or 768x576) from a video source.
Performs JPEG compression before storing to hard disk.
Has support for VTR controls.
Has a variety of special effects and editing tools built in.

Visit Avid's webpages for some customer reviews.

MiroMotion digital video capture and editing system for Mac and PC
Miro provides a number of solutions for desktop publishing, video capture and editing, for the PowerMac and x86 PCs. The DC20 and DC30 use hardware motion-JPEG for on-the-fly compression at various rates, and provide off-line software compression, frame-rate reduction and frame-size reduction for smaller final files.
The DV100 uses an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) bus to connect directly to digital video camcorders that support that interface and allow a computer to rapidly acquire digital video with no conversion or generational loss. The DV100 can be used in conjunction with the the DC30.
As an example, a MiroMotion DC20 and Adobe Premier 4.0 on a PowerMac was used to capture the welcome message at the beginning of this page, which was then exported as uncompressed 15 frames/s Quicktime movie for further processing using RealVideo H.263 based compression software to squash it down to a 13Kbyte file, for a delivery bitrate of 20Kbits/s including audio.

Summary of DC20

The MiroMotion DC20 system on the Mac comes bundled with Adobe Premier software, which is easy to use.
Captures good quality video assets in real time from camera or VTR using JPEG compression.
Includes a number of special effects and editing tools.
Includes a variety of common software compression codecs including H.263 and a hardware JPEG codec.
Does not include MPEG compression codec (at 10/10/97).