I used to work on DPS Velocity in my former company back in 2000. It's a good tool with an excellent virtual storage of footage which makes it very easy to go in and edit frame by frame in other applications such as Photoshop. Hardware with good I/O connectors. I was very happy with it at that time although it had a lot of small flaws which required workarounds. They might be fixed by now. A coupla years after I quit I found Vegas. Damn, Vegas kicks some serious butt. I've never used such a competent editor before. Sure, extra hardware assistance is nice when it comes to editing but now I would use that money on a killer computer instead. Any more specific questions?
Best/Tommy

Yes,
What about the editors and the vid effects and transistions? Any that are too complex for vegas or know where I could get similar effects free? Or do the vid plugins that already on vegas match dps's?

What about Adobe Premier? How do these compare to Vegas? Any tips for using multiple video editors for one movie? What's a good Vegas Video plugin site?

I'd get a NewTek VT 3 and have Vegas4+DVD alongside to fill in the small cracks in your overall desktop video solution. It would generally speaking be cheaper to have both of these than a single Velocity.

If I was heading towards a $6k spend, I'd get the NewTek SX8 and RS8 too.

DPS/Leitch and NewTek have quite significant storage requirements if you do wish to deal with uncompressed/low compressed/lossless formats. Vegas does too, but Sony don't state them, and the device control of anything but DV, just isn't. The hardware based Velocity and software-oriented-hardware of VT 3 don't add much to the cost of a new PC, but do write-off an otherwise DV capable basic PC.

Are your sources all DV, or are some able to truly benefit from a component analogue input (or SDI)?

If you have HiDef aspirations, Vegas is also king in its price range.
Glad you haven't fallen into the Avid trap, which with the DV Express product is like having a Rolls-Royce with a 2 litre diesel engine just so you can claim to be a chauffeur(sp?)!

Well, Vegas FX and transitions does match up with what I remember from Velocity. You can always add the few free video-ones that are out there and it uses Direct X which opens up for a lot of other cool plug-ins, free or not. And then you have the compositing bit in Vegas that was not there in Velocity at the time. And you can mix almost any audio and video format on the timeline. One thing i remember that i hated with Velocity was the fact that you could not move, tweak, add or delete an event on the timeline during playback which ment a lot of Play-look-stop-tweak-play-look-stop-tweak. That might have changed by now.
Best/Tommy