Panasonic Hard Drive camcorder, .mod and dvd

I bought a 40 gb harddrive camcorder from Panasonic a few months ago. After taking lots of movie clips while on vacation in Mexico I set about making a souvenir movie to burn to dvd with my new Vista computer. I was presently surprised that the .mod files on the hard drive could be easily downloaded to my pc without installing the software that came with the camcorder. It was just as easy to import them all into Windows Movie Maker and work with them there. Within a few hours of work I had a nice little vacation movie with titles, slick transitions and special effects. Great right? Not so fast.

When it came time to burn the movie to a dvd with windows dvd maker I found it just didn't work. I either got a cryptic error message (dvd cannot be created for unknown reason) or it just hung up and wouldn't finish the job. I tried to publish the movie to my computer but that didn't work either. A little research told me that the .mod file format was probably the problem.

I then installed the video cam suite that came with the camera and tried to make a movie with that. After using WMM, this program was just awful. The editing was very basic and the controls very hard to use. Once you start making a "dvd list" you can't save it so you have create the dvd and burn it all in one sitting or lose your work. Worst of all the finished dvd has every single movie clip file as a separate chapter instead of one fluid movie. Each clip plays, then freezes at the end for a second or two and then the next clip starts. The individual clips look good on dvd, but the overall "movie" is just awful to watch. As for titles, transitions, etc, well they just don't exist with this software.

I am now thinking I have to convert all of the mod files on my hard drive to another format or find software that works with .mod files and is not complete junk. I have read that converting the files may result in lost quality so I am hesitant to do that because they really do look good. Can anyone suggest editing/burning software that is known to work with this .mod format? Thanks in advance.