Free video editing software??

I'm looking for something fairly simple that works with raw .AVI files (hopefully) to make a few goofy videos and tho I've seen a lot of freeware I am totally wary of trying something unproven, and the meta-spam from searches makes it tricky to know exactly what's what- any advice from anyone??

I ain't looking for special effects, mostly something to just trim clips and stick them together- any help here would be hot

You might want to check to see if Gimp can do what you want to do.

Why don't you just use MS Movie Maker? Does all the basics nicely.

I don't like moviemaker the way it runs... oh and good to "see" you again eh1eh, how's the pond lookin??

MHz- on searching all I could find relating to "gimp" software wise was an image editing program- is there a different version of it that does video??

Thanks for the response!

VirtualdubMod is free, and it works with avi files. It's suitable for basic editing, like editing commercials from recorded video from a dvd recorder, or splicing multible avi files together, as long as they are equal in respect to audio sampling rate and resolution.

Sorry I forgot this thread.
http://www.brickfilms.com/wiki/index.php?title=GIMP-GAP

The GAP (abbreviation for "GIMP Animation Plugin") is an add-on package to the GIMP. It was originally authored for Linux-based operating systems but has subsequently been ported to other computer systems. It allows the user to import video and process them as a series of individual frames. Frames can be copied, deleted, moved, and cropped/re-sized. Additional tools allow the user to apply various filters to a range of frames (lightening/darkening, colorization, chroma-keying, etc), to play the file at different frame rates or even single-stepping frame-by-frame, and to export the end result back to a video file (e.g., MPEG, AVI, RM). A more detailed description of the GAP and its operation can be found on the GIMP-GAP Overview page.
Note: The Windows version of the GAP only supports importing and exporting of uncompressed AVI video*; an external program must be used to convert other formats to a series of graphic images (i.e., "file_0001.JPEG", "file_0002.JPEG", etc).

http://registry.gimp.org/node/3700

here is a tutorial
http://carol.gimp.org/gimp2/animation/gap/extract/