If you are a student... You can get good deals.. You could go with Sony Vegas, Or Adobe Premier which a lot of Post Houses use now. You could also Possibly get AVID Media Composer. Adobe and AVID are considered High end Professional Editors and might be more than you need or want. One good thing about Premier is if you buy the Adobe CS6 you get Premier, After Effects, Photoshop and a couple other great tools. You will have all you need. And I believe you can get the master edition for $799 as a student or you could just get the video Production version for $499.00. Now if you go with Vegas you will also have a student discount, but if you get After Effects it will come with Premier so you would have both as well. Its up to you.. As they say it is not the Tool but the Artist that makes the art. Use what you feel most comfortable with.. I believe they both come with 30 day free trials so you can test them out to see which you like best. I have FCP 7, AVID 6, Sony Vegas, and Premier. I have used them all for different projects.