First, the goal: I’m looking at doing some basic video editing of DV video to put together a short film of stuff from the USA to show friends and family in Brazil this summer.
In the PC world, I am familiar with Microsoft Movie Maker, and that tool suits my purpose fine. But I want to use my shiny new Mac instead!
I started up iMovie HD and plugged my camera in the FireWire jack and was quite pleased to see how easy it was to capture video. Excellent.
As soon as I began working with it I found things getting kind of clumsy – the menus really don’t have very many options at all, and something as simple as selection a portion of a clip to cut was not as easy as I would like (no handy key to set cut-in/cut-out points at the current frame – I had to keep dragging those little triangles from the left side around.)
After a half hour of fiddling, doing some cuts and fades and other neat stuff, iMovie crashed. 
My question is this: What video software should I really be using? Remember my goal – a $1000+ professional video editing suite is not what I’m looking for. What do Mac folks do when they want to put together a simple video?
Should I just be more patient with iMovie and save my project more often?