Can anyone recommend a very simple editing/authoring program for creating DVDs? I have a digital camcorder that I have been capturing the tapes via firewire into long AVI files. All of the software I have is JUNK with a capital J. Movie maker won't burn a DVD, only Video CD, Some pinnacle crap doesn't even work without crashing and the last one i tried which i don't even remember the name of resulted in a DVD that was unreadable in any machine after 6+ hours of "converting", whatever the hell that is.
I don't need to make hollywood movies, i just want to add scene markers to the captured AVI files, maybe a DVD menu, and then burn it into a standard DVD for playback on home equipment.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Adobe Photoshop Elements?

Rendering video takes some CPU power. Most PCs that are set up for video editing are running at least a dual core and at most a quad chip.

If you are running a mid-power singe core chip, it will take a long time to render out the video.

Razman23, did you mean Adobe Premier? Photoshop Elements is only for still photography.

Premiere is for video editing only, adobe solution for dvd is called Encore, very good and easy IF you dont use any subtitles, becouse if you add only a few lines, it turn into a turtle race....seriously most pathetic programing ever ! i think its fixed but, in cs2 it had the nasty habit of simply crashing and making the save file corrupted, wasting hours of work....believe me i know.

you can try sony dvd archtect, very easy to use and very light.
About the 'whatever it is", converting is the process of making your avi files into the mpg2 format that dvd reads,on a single core cpu, it will indeed take a long time, so be read to let the pc doing it overnight, or have some plans in hand like going fishing or watching a movie.
i used to work with encore, but becouse of that subtitle hoging crap, i started using sony's dvd archtect, i really recomend it.
There are also free ones available, i just dont know their names, i think dvd lab has a limited free version.

I use Nero Ultimate Edition Version 7.5, it does everything I need and is very simple to use.

If you are cheap (like me), you can just use Microsoft's Movie Maker program, works fine for most things and has not bad editing capabilities.

The system I was on was a Core2Duo something or other (2.5 ghz maybe?) but the software was old and probably did not recognize dual core CPU.

I tried Microsoft movie maker but it would not let me render to DVD, only to CD-Video.

That Nero Ultimate Edition looks like it might do the trick, I'll see if there is a trial version of that. Thanks for your helps!

This site regularly have various dvd and media "format changers" and some other software thrown in the mix aswell. I don´t have much use of it myself but some of it might work

good call, LazyCrust. I just went there and they have WinX DVD Author 5.5 for free right now. Downloading as we speak...

Yes, sorry..........my bad.

My son had been shown at school how to use Windows Movie Maker and showed me and it's a pretty good tool to say it's free. Obviously very basic and some of the transitions are cheesy but it does what it says on the tin.