I need help with video software.
 

I'm supposed to do a documentary for my U.S. History class as a huge project for the end of the year. I've already downloaded plenty of videos and documentaries to pull my information and video clips from, and I even downloaded Adobe Premiere, but I don't really know where to go from there. The documentaries I have seem to be in Xvid and I don't know how to convert it to a suitable format that works with Premiere. Nor do I really know how to use Premiere too well; I'm not sure what type of quality or size I scale I should make the project so that it would work on a DVD (I'm assuming that's what I'll end up putting it on).
I don't know, it just seems like the entire video software industry is a mess of random formats and a bunch of other junk.

bump.

Have you tried the free (and much less intimidating) video-editing alternative called "Virtualdub" ?

http://www.virtualdub.org/