I have a Panasonic HDC-SD5 video carmera which records in HD format to a memory card. It also came with a DVD burner which burns this format to DVD which I need a blu-ray player to view. I can get about 30 min worth of video on 1 DVD.

My problem is the software that comes with the camera is not very good at all so I am constantly just using the 'backup' feature in the included burner (connect drive to camera, push backup, and it spits out up to 4 DVDs worth of HD video). Now that I have the video backed up on DVD in the HD format (blu-ray), is there any free software that I can use to edit this video and create other HD DVD's with my own menus, transitions, etc?

I was considering buying Pinnacle Studio but I wanted to exaust any free options before biting the bullet.

Any suggestions for software I could use or anything else I could do to make dealing with this AVCHD format any easier that I am unaware of?

Edit: Sorry forgot to include that I am running Windows Vista 64-bit.

Edit: Still haven't found anything that is truely free. Everything has limitations by either time, watermark the video or degrade the quality.

Edit: So I still haven't found really anything, so is there some software I can use to convert the video to another format that I then could use to edit the video?