Camcorders
There are a few basic types of home camcorders this page isn't going to talk about professional ones. The older camcorders are standard 8mm and hi8 which use regular magnetic technique of storing images onto the tape. New camcorders today are either digital8 or miniDV. Digital 8 stores the data on a regular hi8 tape but it uses a special technique of converting the images into bits, just like the computers form of storage. MiniDV uses special cards to store the images the cards are similiar to hard drives except much smaller in size. The great thing about digital over magnetic is that the image quality does not degrade when transfering over a digital wire. If an analog wire is used there will be quality loss but that is due to the wire not the mediums.
Sony and JVC are two top companies that make good camcorders. Many hi8 and most digital camcorders now come with LCD displays so that you can watch what is being shot on a larger screen and in color. All camcorders should come with an s-video and composite port for analog video transfer. The digital ones also come with a firewire port for digital transfering
Capture Cards
A lot of different types of capture cards are out there for the home studio. One type is just a stand alone capture card, these usually need a seperate audio card to capture audio but a stand along card usually is powerful. Pinnacle Systems makes a good line of capture cards called Miro, there are also ones that come with a break out box like Snazzy and Dazzle. Another type that has grown in popularity is one that is an add-on for computer video cards. They usually have the same functionallity as a stand alone but the software package isn't as powerful. These are great for people that like to play games and do video stuff. Finally the latest to come out is firewire, these are used with digital cameras for transfering the digital video at high speeds. Firewire does not come with the composite and s-video ports that the stand alone cards have but some firewire cards have SCSI ports for SCSI hard drives. Oh and s-video has better quality transfer than composite.
Video Editing
There are a lot of different video editing programs out there. Some are more professional and they come with a lot of functions that can be used to make high quality movies others are aimed at people who just wish to do simple edits to the videos of their children. Professional ones come with options to do transparencies, multiple tracks, a ton of filters, and ability to add in plugins(commercial and user). Simple editors just do the basic capturing/importing of the video from tape, cutting, moving, some filters, some transition effects, and exporting.
Two of the most popular high end editing programs are Adobe Premiere and Ulead's Media Studio Pro. Ulead's product is cheaper but more people make filters specifically for Premiere although many filters that can be used in one can be used in the other. I recommend either of these products if you want to do a lot of video editing and are serious about your work. Even more serious professionals would probably use this AND a lot of hardware equipment that is beyond many people's budget, well at least mine. One final note video editing on the computer is also called non-linear editing(NLE) because clips can be moved and edited at anytime.