There are a lot of documentation on the videohelp.com. The answer depends on the source type you have (DV in most cases, may be some analog). Use TMPGEnc for MPG (mpeg-1) encoding, if you like freeware learn AviSynth 2.5 with plugins to achieve the maximum quality - there are a lot of articles for video editing. TMPGEnc also support cut, mux, demux functions for MPG files. For MPEG-2 (DVD) freeware see
http://www.doom9.org/software2.htm