It all depends on the price you want to pay, there a lot of choices out there, you can go from mabey a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks. It sounds like to me a lower end camera would suit you just fine, it doesnt really matter what format you use, tapes, dvd, internal hardrive, as long as you can put it onto a computer. From a computer you can burn it onto a dvd pretty easily. I would highly recommend learning how to do some basic editing on the computer, windows usually comes with a program called windows movie maker and if you dont have it you can probably download it. It is fairly easy to learn, just mess around with it and you will eventually figure it out, it makes things really nice like you can cut out parts you dont want or add music or pictures. Do alot of research on the model you are thinking about buying make sure you can trasfer the video to you computer, also get a better transfer cable than the one you get with it or the quality will be really bad once it makes it to your computer, i would suggest a firewire cable. If you dont understand all the technical talk go to an electronics store like circuit city and tell them what you want to do with your camera and they should be able to get you set up. Also if you got anymore questions just post them in the forum.