[Mitch Chapman]

AIC should give you the best quality of these three options, since it has the highest pixel count and (if I understand correctly) lossless compression. Whether or not you’d notice any loss of detail in going from 1920x1080i to 1440x1080i, is up to your eyes 🙂

I’ve read that HDV quality degrades as you apply more effects, but don’t know why this should be.

[Mitch Chapman]

Do you have iMovie 09? I’m using it with Final Cut Pro 5.1.4. The workflow is roughly like this:

• Use Finder to copy the entire SDHC card content to a folder, “Foo”, on disk.
• Use iMovie 09 to Import Camera Archive, importing from folder “Foo”. (I usually use manual import and bring in only the clips I want.)
• Create an iMovie project. Copy the imported clips into it.
• Share -> Final Cut XML…
• Open the resulting XML file with Final Cut Pro.

In the “Sequence Preset” tab of the Final Cut Pro -> Audio/Video Settings dialog I’ve defined a preset for use with these imported projects. It has these General settings:

Frame Size: 1920 x 1080 – HDTV 1080i (16:9)
Field Dominance: Upper (Odd)
Editing Timebase: 29.97
Timecode Rate: Same As Editing Timebase

QuickTime Video Settings:
Compressor: Apple Intermediate Codec
Quality: 100%

Audio Settings:
Rate: 48 kHz
Depth: 16-bit
Config: Default

Hoping this helps.