Kino is a simple video editor for linux. It imports video in DV format from your computer's ieee1394 firewire connection, if any. It works on NTSC and PAL video.
Kino works on both i386 and AMD64 computers. Getting kino to recognize your ieee1394 firewire connection from your video camera requires some care. The /dev/raw1394 file will not exist until after you plug in your firewire connection and turn on your camera. Some cameras have a rubber flap which covers the firewire connection. If this flops back and blocks complete insertion of the connector into the camera, it will not really be connected. Some external hard disk drives connect to the computer with firewire. For this reason the /dev/raw1394 file belongs to group "disk". You do not normally belong to this group. If you have an external firewire disk, you will want to add yourself to group disk so kino can access your camera. You would do this with the command "# usermod -a -G disk myname". However, if you do not have an external firewire disk, you might prefer to switch /dev/raw1394 to group video, which you already belong to. To do this, in /etc/udev/rules.d/91-permissions.rules change raw1394's group from "disk" to "video", and reboot.
You will want to create a "video" directory in your home directory and capture a few scenes from your camera.
Now that you have kino installed and connected, you need to use your mouse to drag and enlarge kino, and drag the left edge of the kino video screen area to enlarge the metadata area. Metadata will not appear in your video, but will be useful if you want to save your project on a large USB stick for future editing. You click on the right side of the metadata area next to a scene to highlight it. After you enter data, it will not take effect until you hit the "enter" key on your keyboard.
If you decide the last few edits were a mistake, click the "undo" arrow on the kino toolbar a few times to get back to the good place.
When you are ready to quit your first session, click the green down arrow "save project" button on the kino toolbar. You will be prompted to enter a project name, like "vacation". Then a file "vacation.kino" will be created. This is a SMIL file with pointers to start/stop points in each captured "dv" file. You will never again save this project with the "save project" button. Next time, you will "file", "open" "vacation.kino" and when finished, "file" "save".
To create solid color scenes with titles before certain scenes, click "FX", "create", "color range" "fixed color", click on "color" rectangle, select color with mouse, and write down value of "color name" so you can enter exactly the same color for each title. Then click on "video filter", "no change", scroll down to "titler". You can keep the default white lettering or change it, and select size and font. Then, if you have enlarged kino properly, there will be a window that you can click to activate, and enter your title, then click "render".
There are two ways to make a dvd using kino. The way debian apparently prefers is to export your edited dv file back out to your camera onto a blank tape. Then you will connect the camera to a stand alone dvd burner and make your dvd. There are two advantages of this approach. First, the stand alone dvd burner has the capability of making a top level "table of contents" with titles, which kino does not. To get kino to burn a dvd with this top level display requires you to know how to write the code for the display by hand. Second, it does not require non-debian softare packages that might break your video player software or something else. If your firewire chip will import, but not export, you will have to install an extra firewire card with a chip that will both import and export.
If do not have a stand alone dvd burner, and insist on burning dvd's directly from kino on your computer, you must install non-debian software packages. Some of the packages kino requires for full functionality are not in the debian distribution. They are listed in the the requrements section at www.kinodv.org, and are found at www.debian-multimedia.org. At that site you must follow the instructions for downloading and installing the debian-multimedia-keyring, and changing your /etc/apt/sources.list. Then you can use synaptic to install all the recommended packages. After you have done this, you might want to comment out all the entries in sources.list so you will not do future updates. Since you now have official debian packages mixed with non-official packages, future updates might break something so things stop working. You can catch up with a fresh install when the next version of debian comes out.
To make a dvd from kino, more work is necessary. Create the directory /usr/tmp/mydvd. Then as superuser, start kino. Find your video directory at /home/yourname/video and open your vacation.kino file. Put in a blank dvd. Click "export" "MPEG". Enter "/usr/tmp/mydvd", where here "mydvd" refers to a file name, not the directory of the same name. At "output dvdauthor XML" select "burn to /dev/dvd with growisofs", then click "export". When it is finished burning your dvd, the drive will stop whirring. Unfortunately the cursor will not come back until you click "ctrl-c". It will be the plainest kind of dvd. If you want a dvd with a fancy menu you can google to find how to edit the text file at /usr/tmp to do this.
If you need an introduction to linux, see how to use linux.