DVD Authoring

Hi Noyb
As you say your camcorder is not HD but it does give very good quality standard definition videos and records in an easy to edit fomat so Video Studio will like that!!
The authoring software will certainly give you a thumnail menu and you can cusstomise it o give you the background and music that you want.
One of the very simple but useful things you can do in VS is to use say a still image to fade in whilst the sound is still playing and I imagine something like a typical Indiana country scene being interposed over the video clip and fade out again after a few seconds. If you use a pan and zoom on the image as well this gives it a sense of movement that adds to the interest. After all with these types of videos the visual aspect should support the music not the other way round IMHO. With your screenshot sample it looks as if there are two pages to this menu that makes upwards of 16 or so chapters. Seems a bit heavy for one video. If each chapter is say 5 mins long, when you add a few transitions, titles, overlays, and then a fairly sophisticated menu then the overall size is growing alarmingly. You can always cut back the bit rate to get the size down but you will loose quality that way and that seems a shame! It doesn't take long to get 4Gb of material together.
One final point and forgive my being pedantic but in your sample video of "The lost Cord" in the first few seconds there is an annoying Light flickering,in the top right corner, this looks like a fan turning. As you have fortunately used a tripod for this clip it will be fairly easy to overlay that light with a still image of the "God Bless America" Poster taken from another clip somewhere. There is a distort facility in VS so the angle wont matter too much.
BTW I do hope you realise that you have just embarked on a new way of life that is likely to take you over like the plague, it is quite time consuming (Ask my wife if you don't believe me )

Why are you using such an old version of Video Studio? It is known to have problems ith Win 7! Not too sure what this paragaph means "After I fought off an attack from the Borg, trying to assimilate my computer ..
by adding about a dozen startups .. several task schedules ..
adding a bunch of browser tool bars .. and changing my Browser .. I got it installed."
Chapters are the individual performances that you designate in the menu with those thumnails that appear in your screnshot.
This is such a big subject that I would be concerned that you expect to produce good DVD's within a couple of weeks from a standing start.
Did your software come with the Camcorder? If so is it an SE edition?

Your Video Studio trial is the latest version X3. You threw me a bit but calling it Studio 10 earlier and there was indeed a version 10 some years ago. When Corel bought out Ulead they changed some of the nomenclture of theuir products bu basically Video Studio X3 is in fact VS 13 (they just used a Roman X to make the ten. Daft isn't it!
Shall we stick with just the Corel program then I can help but I don't know the other one. Suffice to say there is probably an element of "Options" in the burn windows that allows you to decide what happens when one clip finishes on a DVD. Either go back to Main menu or continue with the next clip. As I say I don't know that prog. so can't say for sure.

I'm thinking Studio is like Photoshop .. It requires a long learning time and wetware.

Indeed it does. if anything it is a little more complex than Photoshop. There are so many twists and turns in video editing and there is so much more you and indeed need to do to get really good results.
As you say stick to the easy path for now and leave the learning curve until later. Would encourage you, though to go ahea when time permits as you have a good camcorder plus the interest so the world is your oyster so to speak. It's a short step to printing you own DVD's on an Ink Jet printer, fascinating as I am learning!!!!