You will need a PC with as much horsepower as you can muster. For video and audio editing I had one built special with a 2.5 GHz Pentium Duo, 4 GB memory and 2 hard drives - 80 GB for system and applications, and 400 GB for data. I'm using Sony Vegas for video editing and DVD authoring. It's got a lot of capabilities, probably more than you will need for simple conversion and burning. You will need a firewire cable (and a firewire port on the computer) to link the camera to your PC. You want as little extraneous stuff running on the computer so that there is as much processor and I/O capacity to capture the video properly.

I hope I haven't scared you off of the whole idea, but video production requires a lot of processor power and memory/storage. We are talking about file sizes in the Gigabytes here. It takes a big pipe to ship that much data. Makes audio look like ASCII in comparison.

Jeff