Originally Posted by
digibud
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.
My understanding, which is based on working with a guy who used to be an engineer on Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro is that none of today's video editing programs operate on H.264 directly. They all convert video, no matter what the origin, into an internal format that's optimized for editing, rather than space savings. Once you're done editing your movie, you can then export to H.264 for final playback. Most of my Go Pro-owning friends keep "important" movies saved in their editing program's native format however, since the conversion to H.264 is lossy. Less important movies get archived using H.264, for space savings. Most of these guys have multi-terabyte hard drives, or RAID arrays, for storing data.