I would like to edit some video, speed up some scenes, slow some down, crop some frames, change the brightness and contrast, put different clips together and put the video on CD's and DVD's.

I doubt there is any freeware that will do anything like this but there must be some software that runs in the $100- $200 range that will work.

I have a dual core processor with 2GB of ram and more than adequate hard drive space.