I received Pinnacle Instant CD+DVD suite bundled with my burner. Expression has been a very useful tool for me. I have a miniDV camcorder with firewire out, and Expression controls it nicely. Handles the transport features of the camcorder (rewind, ff, stop, pause, etc) and imports the tape into AVI nicely. From there, it will allow you basic authoring with menus. Sets chapter stops too. A handful of menu templates to choose from.

Not extremely flexible, but perfectly fine for home movie authoring.

Also, check out a freeware application called DVIO. This is a simple freeware video capture program. No features other than straight capture.