I've used mostly the same software for all 27 episodes of "Turjan's Travels" so far :-
Windows Movie Maker Live - for video editing and rendering to a YouTube-friendly format.
Audacity - for audio work (speech, music, sound effects etc)
Paint Shop Pro 7 - for making/doctoring stills to use in animation & transitions (such as the duststorm effect I created for episode #16 "Dead and Buried")
More recently I've added the video cropping & resampling program
Handbrake to that list. It's good for cropping frame sizes, and has allowed me to do things like chop off the left info panel in the Galaxy map. It also resamples raw footage into a minimally lossy format that drastically cuts down the file sizes I get when I capture footage with
Shadowplay - very handy if you're like me and take tons of video you'll never use but like to have on hand "just in case"
I do have
Blender, but its learning curve is a tad steep, and I'm one of those "learn by tinkering" types, so usually I fall back on some bizarre and probably needlessly cumbersome imaginative workaround to get the effect I want in the other software tools, rather than biting the bullet and actually learning to use Blender's uber-powerful features. So far I've only resorted to Blender once, to reverse a piece of footage - something old Movie Maker could do, but which the current version cannot. Thanks MS!
I have to say, the current incarnation of Movie Maker is somewhat annoying and limited, especially compared to its predecessor - but it still does the job of basic editing and transitions well enough, and can handle an occasional effect, and that's all I've needed to date in "Turjan's Travels".
However you slice it, the one thing all (except PSP7 - I bought that over 10 years ago...) of these tools have in common is that
THEY'RE FREE!!Because I am poor, and therefore this price tag appeals to me
