editing videos and sending them over gmail

so here is the story. i bought the macbook because my desktop was getting pretty old and not running wroth a dam. i got the mac because it was supposed to be easy to use and good with videos.

i take the sd card from the camera plug it in and it copies the video to iphoto where i trimmed the videos and tired to link them together into one long video so when i email it i only attach 1 thing. but when i went to try and compile the small videos to make a big one it didn't work and my sister suggested imovie so i got that on my laptop and it imported the videos from iphoto and let me compile them together then i attached the video to the email and sent it to my moms ipad and she said it turned into a zip file of some sort and wouldnt work.

all i want to do is take my videos off my sd card be able to edit them and email them, what am i doing wrong? is there a different program i should have? any help would be appreciated.

What you are doing wrong is trying to email videos longer than, say, a minute. People's inboxes just can't handle really large files, and video that are larger than a postage stamp and run longer than a minute or two are about the limit.

Upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo (password protect it for private viewing if you don't want it public). Or upload them to Dropbox or a service like that. In either case, then just send the people you want to an email with the URL (and password if necessary). Works way better.

thanks, i guess a 720p vid is pretty dam big its taking 45 minuts to load the dam thing

That would do it. Depending upon a few settings that could be quite large. Certainly too large for most mail gateways.
I used to use my MobileMe account for these situations but sadly that is no more. Try one of the services suggested above.