Can anyone recommend a good and free or low-cost (HD) video editing program? It should have advanced rendering options (more complex than f.i. Windows Movie Maker), rendering speed is not important.
I'm familiar with Sonic Vegas 3/4 and Sony Vegas Pro 8/9, so a similar approach would be nice!

Magix Video Deluxe. The very best video program for me. Great usability, easy to handle, many functions in video and audio. 40€ on eBay for the version of last year.
http://www.magix.com/de/video-deluxe/

I've heard that cinefx (formerly known as jahshaka) works pretty well, haven't tried it yet, though. http://www.cinefx.org/

It's also free btw.

Premiere Elements is great, too. But Magix is better in my opinion

I can recommend Magix Video Deluxe too. I never liked Premiere Elements just as I don't like Photoshop Elements. You feel like you're always having a "buy full version for this nifty missing feature" sign in your face...

Adobe Premiere Elements is very powerful and ive used it for a long time, however the interface is super slow since they use a flash window or whatever that crap is. It has to redraw it every frame basically and it tends to crash a lot

Thanks, I've just tested Magix Video Deluxe 17 Premium and it looks like a pretty neat tool. Does the cheap (70Euro) version have the advanced rendering options (for each codec) like the Premium edition? The default output is inacceptable.

No, I don`t think so.
I would buy Video Deluxe 16 Premium for ~50€ on eBay. That´s way better than version 17 standard.

Done! Thanks again. I hope someday my games pay back what I invested, hopefully even more.

I did a research last year and found that all these programs from Adobe, Magix and other have problems with later editions. Often they were reported to be not stable with real HD or when editing long videos. I found many complains in their forums or when I read Amazon reviews, especially related to the latest editions. Some problems were related to Win7 or 64-bit.

So in the end I bought Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD, that was told to be the most reliable one. I liked it instantly, there are tons of video tutorials included, good help and all the features that the other ones offer.