In my quest to covert my analog VHS and 8mm tapes to DVD and burn new DV videos to DVD, I have tried the following packages:
MS Movie Maker
Ulead Video Studio
Roxio VideoWave
Adobe Premiere
Sonic MyDVD
and have Pinnacle 8 on the way ($10 after rebate shipped, why not??)

To be fair, I did not spend much time with Premiere - too complicated!

All of the packages have nice features. All but Sonic MyDVD produces crappy DVD's! Sonic MyDVD give the best results audio and video wise, but is missing a lot of the features in VideoWave and Ulead Video Studio.

MyDVD did come pre-installed on my new Dell. Could it be that it was somehow optimized to capture and burn? If that is a strong possibility, what could I do to try to optimize the other software systems??