I am a windows user who has moved to Gentoo
Linux. One of my hobbies is video editing.
I just want to know wot the bes video editing software would be?

I'm quite the noob when it comes to video editing. But from my experiences so far, I would say that you might be out of luck to find something equal to features/performance that you might find on a windows machine. I'm not sure what you reasons for the switch from win to linux were, but you might be better of with an Apple machine.

LiVES. its definitely not Premiere, but it's good and it's in your portage tree.

Kino has (I believe) the best dv capture, it does not have many fancy options but is quite quick, especially once you get used to the keyboard commands.
Kino can be useful for capturing footage, then using a more powerful program to edit.

Here are a couple of websites I found useful.

http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/Lin...rialVideo.html
http://kino.schirmacher.de/

Mainconcept has a demo of it's product available, I tried it's last version with no capture ability and limited codecs, not worth the money at the time, but, it may be better now.
www.mainconcept.com/mainactor_v5.shtml#linux

Is there anything that can do special effects like After Effects?

Cinelerra is by far the best there is for linux. It is certainly on par with Adobe Premiere if not (dare i?) better! :-) I use it for editing and obviously adding effects to video and sound from Kino using *.mov files. I use Kino to grab video from my camcorder and export so i can load it into Cinelerra. Now cinelerra rocks there is no doubt about that but you are going to need a system that can handle this kind of software. It's professional video editing software that requires a decent machine (or a render farm :-\ ) to make use of it's features. I finally got it to compile and work on my AMD64. Gotta love that 64bit power. I use to use it on a 2400XP 512ram and it wasn't "that" bad. Check it out. It's the counterpart of Premiere on Linux (athough the GUI for Cinelerra is a little...........well, better than i could ever do).

http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3


This is another video editor. Never used it myself (64bit fails on make) but it looks ok.
http://www.jahshaka.com/

I use Main Actor.. it's a commercial program, but they have a free evaluation version if you wanna try it. as for Cinelerra... that program hates me. haha. it woulden't use any of the video i had/captured myself. anyways, my vote goes for Main Actor lol.