Finally Finished Editing Vacation Video from 6 Years Ago
6 years ago my wife and I went on a great vacation to New Zealand. I took my video camera (a Canon GL-1), and shot lots of video footage- about 3-4 hours of raw footage. We were there for 10 days. It was great.
While in film school I was taught video editing on three different software products: Adobe Primier, Final Cut Pro, and Avid. Out of all of them I liked Final Cut Pro the best, and felt most comfortable in it. So, back in 2004 (the same year that we went to New Zealand) I purchased a Mac Pro tower and Final Cut Pro (academic version). And I imported the footage and began editing it near the end of that year. Since then I've gotten rid of that tower and now have a 20" iMac and have the latest version of Final Cut Express (it is better than my old version of FCP from 6 years ago).
I just "finished" editing it this summer 2010! Whew! I put finished in quotes because there are things that could still be improved, but I'm not going to worry about them any more. It is time to move on to another project. Now that the editing is done, I need to put the DVD together for it.
One of the main reasons it has taken me so long is simply that it hasn't been a top priority for me. And I also find that when I'm editing, I want the final result to look professional. When editing my own vacation I try to imaging someone else who is not familiar with me or my wife watching it and edit it so that it would be interesting to them. I mean, at some point I expect my children to see these videos and I hope the videos stand on their own without needing to be explained. Is that over kill? Perhaps. But it means that I'm not ashamed to show off my work to any one. Even if I look ridiculous in parts of the video, the video itself tells a story in an structured way.
So lessons learned? I'd say, when editing vacation videos, make it a higher priority to finish them within a year of the trip. Next time. 
What else? Definitely I learned a lot about audio levels. Things sound totally different when on the computer versus on the tv. Any music on the sound track needs to peak somewhere around -17db and dialog captured from the camera should be between 0db and +7db depending. Audio was a big time consumer for me. I hate to have to adjust volume on the tv when watching something, so you need to do all the normalizing when editing. But it pays off if you can hear everything when watching it on the tv and don't need to touch the remote at all during it. Any other lessons? Perhaps one more- migrating a video project from one computer to another, and from one version of video editing software to another can be risky. There was a time when I nearly had to start all over again when I got my new iMac. The lesson learned- it is better to complete a project on one platform than to let it languish and have to be migrated onto another. The risk of something going wrong and chances for headaches are pretty high.