Using movie mode on finepix to create dvd

Have you ever used a digital camera to shoot video footage, then convert the resulting .avi's into a dvd using some basic dvd authoring software? Often when I'm bored I pick up my Palm z22 and write a few pages of dribble, most of which gets deleted, but the other day I noticed one of our digital camera's has a movie mode. Actually most cameras have a movie mode, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but its something I've actually never thought of, most often I use a digital camera for taking stills.

The Fuji Finepix camera is an s5500, its an older camera that we've been thinking of giving to a friend, anyway it records .avi files in either Pal or NTSC, and with the option of 640 or 320 resolution. Our camera has a 512mb xd card in it, which gives a little over 7 minutes of video. I decided to have a play with it, boredom makes for strange experiments. Afterwards I thought the experiment might actually be worthwhile, we've got quite a few friends who have digital camera's but don't have a video camera, and when we start travelling the world it might be months or years before we see family and friends again, so I thought if I can play with the technology I might be able to put together a basic how-to for our loved ones so they can take a few minutes of video footage and send it to us.

Shooting the video is a no-brainer, although the Finepix really needs a steady hand and slow panning. I loved tha fact that the color balance and correction were automatic and even in a darker room the video came through nicely - quite different from still mode where darker rooms really need the flash.

Hooking up to my PC I copied all the files into MyVideos, than watched them all in media player. They are actually quite usable. Of course just having the avi files on your PC does not a movie make, so I opened windows movie maker and imported a couple of the files. For free software this is amazingly full featured. Drag the avi onto the timeline, add title and credits, choose transitions between clips, very easy stuff.

I saved my file as a high quality pal video, then opened it in media player and voila, my first home movie using a digital camera. But this is where the awkward part comes in, no ability to convert this to dvd. I hope MS add that function to Vista when its released. Otherwise you will need to download an avi to mpeg2 converter, or buy some professional dvd authoring software.

Bit of a shame really because it does mean I'm going to have to give my little project some more thought before I can create my how-to for friends and family. Most of them use Windows and won't have any software for authoring dvd's so the project might consume a fair bit of brain power on my part to make it quick and easy. Otherwise they just won't bother, and then we'll never get any video from them.

As an aside, I guess I could always convince them to buy a mac, the iLife suite wouldn't have a problem creating a dvd with chapters and menus from the avi's that a digital camera produces. Ooh, as an extra aside, somewhere around 12% of my site visitors use mac's, so I'm expecting you guys to comment and tell us Windows users how good iLife really is. Personally I'm thinking of getting one of the new black macbooks instead of a new Windows laptop.