Advantages of FCE HD over iMovie HD (with Sony HDR HC3)?

Hi!
I'm new to the digital Video world. Sadly I'm always a bit crazy and thought to buy a camera which will be a bit more future proof and decided to go for a Sony HDR HC3. I was using iMovie 6 HD with it and can import movies fine (ok not full speed on my 2Ghz iMac G5 but I can live with that), I can cut them but I can't realy render them as normal movies out of iMovie. Actually I can't do anything with them it always turns out to be a very bad jerky output format. So reading the iMovie forum, it seems thats normal behavior. People say it needs to be sent back on camera tape and get it converted by the camera to DV and then use it. Actually importing DV and then writing a DVD or encoding it to an other fileformat really works well.
So my question is, can FCE HD handle HDV better? Like export it to normal DVD? Meaning like rendering the 1440 x 1080 interlaced to the DVD non interlaced resolution?
iMovie shows me the Project is 1080i-25 (yes I'm using PAL). So I asume it merges the two half pictures to one 1080 and that results in 25 frames/sec...
Any experiance with FCE and Sony HC3 here? Roughly 300 Euros/$300 is a bit too much to buy it and it turns out to be not much of a difference then iMovie (for exporting and handling HDV).
Thanks for your help and feedback!
Holger

Hi!
The reason why I ask is some weired behavior I have with IMovie 6 HD/Quicktime 7 on the latest Tiger release:
I can import HDV from my Sony HC3 perfectly, and also export every unedited material to the camera perfectly. But when the HD material needs to recoded for use on DVD or as quicktime movie or just when you add titles effects etc. Output is getting very jerky.
To test I did the following. I recorded a 360 degrees turn in a room in HDV. It shows perfectly smooth on the camera screen when playbacked, smooth on TV etc. Smooth means as you see it when turning your head..
So now I import it in HDV into iMovie. If i take the unedited film and want it to export it to any other format like DVD or an MPEG4 movie, things get jerky, the 360 degrees turn doesn't look nice anymore.
I read in other forums, that thats in issue with HDV and you should let the camera convert it to DV, so the cuted material needs to be transfered back to the camera, and then let it convert it to DV.
OK, so if I import HDV converted by the camera to DV its perfectly smooth, also on DVD on quicktime movies etc.
When I import HDV in iMovie, and put a title text in the movie for like 10 secs out of the 20. iMovie will split the clip to two 10 sec ones and render the text in the first block. If I record it back as HDV on the camera tape and then reimport it with beeing converted as DV the following happens:
The first 10 secs with the title are jerky, the second 10 secs are smooth as before.
This needs to be related with the IMovie/Quicktime encoding, not with the camera (I have two of it to see if its not the hardware). So I'm really thinking It's either an iMovie problem an Quicktime problem or both together...
So if FCE would handle the rendering process different... It would be worth to get it...
Any ideas?
Holger

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