2 problems

I just picked up a Dazzle 80. I have been backing up dvd's for some time now. I'm pretty familiar with creating and converting dvd's, vcd's, svcd's, etc. However, I have never attempted to start off (from scratch) from a capture device.

This is what's happening:

I'm trying to convert a VHS tape to DVD.

I installed the Dazzle hardware and the Pinnacle Studio Quick Start software. This was pretty self explanatory. From there, I plugged in my analog camcorder and captured the video. I noticed that the video was somewhat distorted at the top of the frame in the capture window within the pinnacle studio quick start software. It almost looks like the tops of the heads of the people in the video are melting. Really, it looks like a tracking problem. However, the camcorder i'm using has a display, and in looking at the display, there is not distortion at all. I"m figuring there's something going wrong in the acutal capture itself. Any help?

That was problem one. Problem two seems to be more serious.

2. After I got the captured video, although distorted slightly, I decided to still try to put it on dvd, just to test it out. So, Within the Pinnacle Studio Quick Start software, I clicked on the "make movie" icon and tried to put it directly onto disk. It told me that the dvd disc wasn't big enough for the project. (oh, by the way, this is all after i did some small editing, to cut off the leader and such from the movie) So...instead of burning directly to disc, I figured that i'll just convert it to mpg in that window, load it into tmpgenc dvd author and mess around with it. But wait- tmpgenc dvd author freezes up when i select this mpg file and tmpgenc becomes unresponsive. So, I figured that maybe tmpgenc was just being finnickey, then I tried to load it into Ulead DVD movie factory...same problem. I've never had any problems with tmpgenc dvd author before, however, i don't think i've ever actually used ulead dvd movie factory.

I don't know if it matters much here, but i used the default settings for creating the mpg file.

And, I should mention, i tried to just find the mpg file in "my computer" and when i clicked on it, real player froze up...everything seems unwilling to load this file up....but, when i tried to load it up in tmpgenc plus to reencode it, it seemed as though that program had no problem accepting the mpg. (i didn't actually let it reencode it, i just wanted to see if anything would read it- i don't feel like i should have to have an additional step in making a simple dvd.) Help!