If you do much at all with video you'll need an external hard drive or you'll add a drive to your tower. PC users have a few programs like Sony Vegas or the Adobe offerings as well as many other options. Mac users have iMovie, FCPx and possibly others that I am unaware of. You'll import the video and you may have to "transcode" the video if your computer is not fast enough to work with the original H264 files. The H264files require a faster computer than transcoded files but the H264 are roughly 8x smaller so a fast computer is a big help with video files. Even a new iMac or similar computer is plenty fast. You do need USB3 or Firewire or Thunderbolt, estata...almost anything but USB2.0.