There are ways of making a 16:9 format video, and this essentially involves cropping the top and bottom of your picture if you don't have a camcorder with a 16:9 option. This guide touches on this
http://www.marcpeters.co.uk/tmpgenctools.html (click the link, press ctrl-f and type 16:9). There's also this guide, which can be followed with a few modifications:
http://www.videoeditingforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=136
Essentially, what you have to do is crop the top and bottom of your video to create a 16:9 shape but don't maintain the aspect ratio so your video looks all squished up, then tell your encoder to put a 16:9 aspect ratio header on your video and on playback, you'll get a video that's strectched out. Alternatively crop the top and bottom (or mask them), then leave the current aspect ratio to get 4:3 with black bars.
I use Adobe Premiere for my credits, but alternatives are After Effects and Tittle Deko. For DVD creation I've settled on Sonic DVDit after using many an authoring software. This creates good looking menus, and the DVD files, which I then burn with Nero.