I am new to video editing, and need some advice.

I need to develop some video editing automation, but I am new to video technologies. The goal is to be able to provide basic editing functionality like clip, merge, transitions, text overlay, saturation, basic audio mixing, downsizing, etc. The application needs to be fully automated (think command line), and we were not able to find something flexible enough, so we'll probably develop the application ourselfs. When I say fully automated, I mean, we will give the vide file, and a configuration file describing the action, and will not use any UI. And it needs to have an SDK for Windows.

There are two main scenarios. 1. Conversion, 2. Editing.

1. For conversion, we need to convert from uncompressed DV (SD) to mpeg2, h264, or wmv.
2. For editing we need to edit both uncompressed DV and also encoded files (mpeg2, mpeg4, etc)

Now, using some existing tools (which do processing in software only), we were unimpressed with the output quality and performance. The video quality is very important to us, and it needs to be as fast as possible. (We need to process 100s of videos daily).

What are your recommendations for hardware/software? Cost is not an issue as long as it does the job. I looked at BlackMagic, BlueFish, AJA cards, but I am not even sure if I need them (again, I have no experience in video).

Although at this time almost all of our videos are SD, we'll need to support HD in the near future. HD is not a priority right now, but it would be a plus if we could handle it as well.

Thanks,
<jason:vince/>

ffmpeg , MEncoder , Tmpeg , virtual dubb , stuff like that open source and free to use personally type projects, have within them various capabilities for scripting encoding filtering working with DirectShow stuff and all.
that is all i know, you could start searching those projects and out of that you will also find many others. If it would be used for a commertial product thing, then you would just licence it, probably better and cheaper than licencing from huge corporations.
many of the normal editing programs Premiere, Vegas, will have interface capability too with a "SDK" depends on how deep difficult and expenencive you want to get.

You should look at the scripting in Vegas as you may well be able to do all you want within Vegas by running scripts.

Ron Evans