Best format for HD imovie export & 'archiving' source video for future

I’m sort of new to this but your help would be appreciated. I want to make sure I don’t mess up and delete any ‘precious’ moments.
I recently purchased a Canon HF100 Camcorder and have been recording various short movies and wanted to ‘plan’ for the future
1. I import the movies directly into imovie 08 without any issues (at the highest quality). I then drag the “MTS” files from my camcorder to a folder on my desktop (still compressed) and plan to save them for ‘future’ use (i.e., burn them to DVD or maybe move to an external hard drive) – I want to make sure I don’t lose any of the video ‘quality’
 Will I be able to easily ‘load’ these MTS files into imovie or other video software?
2. I currently do not have a HD DVD player or Blu Ray Player – but plan to get one in the near future. I want to make sure that when I export movies from imovie 08 I export the movie with the best HD quality.
 I’ve exported the movie using the best mac settings (.MOV) files, and they look ok on the computer, but the resolution was lower than the native resolution from the camcorder. I’ve also messed around with some of the various settings in the Quicktime, but none really looked that good with playback on the mac and there were a lot of different options I was not familiar with (maybe because I don’t have the Quicktimepro?) – anyway can anyone recommend some ‘univeral’ HD settings that I should use?
3. Once I save a movie to quicktime (or whatever the best recommended setting from #2 above), I’m assuming I can re-open or import it back into imovie and re-edit – correct?

HI there,
You need to preserve the file structure to a certain extent. Inside the Canon directory is a folder named "private" Inside that is one named "AVCHD". that's the one that needs to be saved, preserving directory structure within. It's best to save it as a disk image. Once opened, that disk image is seen as the camera by FCE or iMovie 08. Here's a thread about this on MacRumours (I'm gpeden):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=514751
I'm new to this too, but I have that much figured out so far:) Of course, one needs an intel Mac for this.
I'm preserving the raw files for the future in the disk images (and burning the 8 gig card's disk images to dual layer DVD - data only, for the ones I really want to backup), which assures me that any future upgrades to hardware or codecs will be able to possibly improve over what's available today.
Message was edited by: Snapt

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