Editing iPhone video without loss of quality

I've a stack of video clips taken from my iPhone 3GS which I want to simply stitch together and edit down a little WITHOUT loss of quality.
All I want to do is import, crop and stitch them together, thus create a single file *with no change in image quality*. (for smaller projects, I used to do this kind of thing in older versions of QuickTime Pro.)
What is the best procedure for this in iMovie 09? Indeed, can it be done?
My understanding is that ANY re-compression will result in artefacts and loss in quality.
Further info...
I've managed to import the clips ok (making sure any options to 'optimise' anything are turned off) and edit them together in iMovie. This way, the import is fast and the images seems untouched, so I assumed no conversion has been done on the video (I think I'm wrong here?)
(Setting the project aspect ratio to 4:3 was the other gotcha.)
Having sorted the above out, and done some editing, I now want to export to a single file. I understand the iPhone codec is H264. However, when I export (via quicktime) and select H264, it wants to re-compress. I worry this will loose quality.
When I export with lossless compression, of course I get a 150G file - owch. The sum total size of the originals are 2.63G
Any suggestions?

iMovie will re-compress. To me this is a small price to pay for having an edited movie. Personally, I would optimize, but if you keep your movies simple, you will be OK without. If you decide to apply image stabilization or speed changes, you will definitely need to optimize. Optimization resolves the highly compressed h.264 frames into full frames in Apple Intermediate Codec.
While the quality loss you may experience is not likely to be visible to the naked eye, if that is your only criterion, then avoid iMovie and follow QuickTime Kirk's advice.
Here is a [sample video|http://vimeo.com/7093442] that I made in a Dentist Office. You can see what the re-compression looks like. In this case, I did not optimize.
Editing in iMovie is non-destructive, so you can try it both ways (imovie and QuickTime Pro) and see if you can tell the difference.
Message was edited by: AppleMan1958

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Message was edited by: Michael Collins3

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