What is the Best Video Editor for Lip Syncing?

[NigaiAmai Yume]

Greetings!

I've been designing AMVs in my head for 15 years (Before I even got on the Internet, let alone knew other people did this insanity! ^-^ ). I've FINALLY gotten to the point where the combination of interest, accessable material, and time has pushed me to actually attempting making them.

I've gone through the A&E's Tech Guide, worked out Avisynth, VirtualDub, and Audacity (I'm largely broke, so I like the free stuff lol). Now all I need in a video editor.

My style of videos is primarily storytelling - the only "effect" I'm interested in is lip syncing (And yes, I've read that faq, too). Naturally, this is best served by a program that allows for minute control over timing, both in the video clips/frames and the audio. Unfortunately, as I'm just starting out, I don't know where to find that lovely feature.

I would greatly appriciate suggestions as to which nonlinear editor would best suit my style of work.

Facts:

- I'm stuck with Windows. Working with what I have, and haven't gotten the courage yet to try Linux.

- I'm primarily interested in fine-detail-control. Specifically, I'd like to get into lip syncing, so I need the ability to edit at frame level while keeping a good eye on audio.

- Multiple audio and video tracks also very useful. I can work around limits to both, but I've gotten used to being able to split things with Audacity.

- I have no interest in special effects. The ability to nicely speed up or slow down a particular clip would be great (if likely greatly above my budget), but I don't use transitions or anything in my style of video.

- Obviously, I'd prefer something on the lower end of budgetting. As I'm just starting out and just-graduated broke, I'd prefer not to risk an investment until I know I like it.

IS there anything that's like a mix of Audacity and VirtualDub? Both programs feel very natural to me, just the right amount of features.

Tried:

- Windows Movie Maker. No were near the control I want.

- Adobe Premiere Elements free trial. Feels bloated. I can't seem to figure out how to play around with the frames of clips, or even do much editing beyond splitting clips. Maybe I can get it to work with practice if that's the best suggestion, but my current computer sure isn't too happy running it.

[Haeresis]

A good NLE to try would be Magix Movie Edit Pro. It's a decent NLE that has all of things that you want and I don't think that it's that complicated to figure out. It also has some effects if you want to try those out when your experimenting with new things. It costs $50 which is pretty cheap compared to other video editors that can cost up to $400 or higher. Also I would suggest if you are going to do any lip syncing that you use an image editor such as The GIMP(which is also free) to mask out any lip flap.

[Panky]

If you tried Adobe Premiere Elements, AFAIK, it's has pretty much a -similar- interface to Adobe Premiere's other types of NLE. Best thing to do is find on youtube some kind of basic tutorials, and you'll be ready to go with the necessary. Real thing is, it looks hard, and you may believe that only thing it can do is cut, but cutting clips is all you will need to achieve lip syncing and most of actual editing. See, what you could do is get cuts of different phases frames of a character opening his mouth (in most cases 5 or 6) and then play around to find a natural way of moving the mouth. Or you could as well play around with the character saying something in the series and look if it somehow syncs with the music itself. I don't know if what you want is to mask out a character with lip sync included, that would require a little more work and usually a image editor program.
If Adobe Premiere NLEs anyway don't look good for you, I would look into what Haeresis suggested. There isn't one way to do lip syncing, but you should find the one that best applies to your style.