How to burn a DVD from 3 .mov files

I would like to burn a DVD of a 640 resolution video (.mov files) from a Canon SX40 HS camera. It will not import into iphoto. Do I take it into the proprietary software from Canon (CameraWindow and Image Browser) or can I burn it to iDVD and or view it on my Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard OSX v 10.6.8? Do I need to convert it from .mov to .avi or some other file? Will imovie work or do I need something more advanced? I have CS4. Note that there are 3 separate .mov files since this camera cannot take a video clip longer than 30 minutes. Thanks so much.

.mov is a container, not a format. Finding out what codecs are used in the actual video clips would be helpful.

In the meantime, I'm going to suggest you look at MPEG Streamclip, a free tool that can generally convert most formats into something standard so that iMovie or iDVD can see them.

Once converted, if you don't want to edit the movies, you can just drag them into an iDVD project window.

Thank you for your suggestions. I finally talked to the computer specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University. Here is what he suggested. (I did copy the files from the camera to iphoto.) To burn the files he said that in iphoto I would select all 3 video files and click on SHARE, and then on SEND TO IDVD and not just BURN. That way the videos would be converted to a format that is used for playing DVDs on both Macs and PCs. Therefore it was not necessary to convert the files nor did I drag the files into imovie since I was not editing them. It worked! Thanks so much.

That's interesting. Didn't know you could do it that way.