Capture to Encode to Author to DVD Newb Q

[barry153]

Need advice if I am doing this right, especially on the capture and encode process. Focus is capturing DV from Sony TRV22 by firewire to comp then make a finished product with chapters and menus to give to friends/relatives to play in stand alone players.
Capturing using WMM2, and then using TMPGenc to import file and convert, then using TMPGauthor1.5 to add chapters, menus and then Burning to DVD with TMPGauthor DVD Writing Tool.
QUESTION...is there another program, freeware or cheap, I could use to capture the DVD video from camcorder that would place it into a format that could be imported directly by TMPGauthor thereby skipping the convert process? Sorry, still learning and havent gotten down all the lingo yet. PS I wasted over a month with Roxio Plat all in one and it was ok overall, but I think they rushed the DVD Builder part and its very limited and slow, did I say it was slow

[curryman]

there are progs that will capture directly to mpeg, you can read about them in the tools section to the left.
personally, I think you are better off doing it the way you are doing now (you get better picture quality)