Combining 16:9, 24p and standard NTSC in FCE

Question

Please forgive the newbie ignorance, but I seem to have gotten myself into a severe predicament with no practical way out. Here's the situation:
In a rush of naive enthusiasm, a desire to NOT indulge my usual tendency toward perfectionistic procrastination paralysis, encouragement by others—including experienced advisors, albeit one with Windows/Avid-only experience and the other a successful, working director/screenplay writer with a minimal understanding of technical issues—and finally, getting snowed by glowing sales brochures with hidden fine print that glossed over critical compatibility issues, I borrowed a s-load of money and launched my documentary by jumping out of a plane with the following parachute:
1) Essential outdoor footage (rushed to take advantage of good summer weather) shot at 24p in true 16:9 on a borrowed Canon XL2.
2) Equally essential indoor footage (and pretty much all remaining future footage) shot in standard NTSC (29.97i? 4:3) on my Canon GL2.
3) An aging dual 500 G4 that's been expensively brought up to minimal Final Cut Express standards through a series of hundred bucks here, several hundred bucks there steps. (I probably could've bought a new Mac for what I've spent on techno-duct tape for the old!)
4) A desperate hope that I might find some way to get 1-3 to work together before I hit a rapidly enlarging terra firma!
Lest you think I'm totally nuts, let me say in my defense that I have been experimenting with post-production procedures along the way—first with iMovie until it became obvious it wouldn't do the effects I wanted and now with FCE, which will handle the minimal fancy-schmancy stuff my doc needs. But now based on my fitfully improving understanding of the technical constraints, I believe I've been misled by "false" iMovie and FCE WYSIWYG images that implied I could meld my XL2 and GL2 footage without problem.
To be more specific, I was able to successfully capture the XL2 footage in iMovie through my GL2, or at least I thought I was. I assumed the data, being digital and all, would capture correctly regardless of camera. When I could see it squished horizontally in 4:3 on my monitor, I assumed it had transferred correctly and could then be manipulated however I wanted. After I got FCE, I seemed to be able to capture the two kinds of footage and even put them together (of course, with corresponding letter- and pillar-boxing), but am now thinking I've got a mess underneath what I see on screen.
All of which is to ask, Is there any practical way to solve my problem? My piggy bank is down to its last few pennies, and short of winning the lottery, my immediate possibility of getting more cash is nil. My quixotic goal is to turn this mess into a real (24p, 16:9) movie. (If I can get them combined, I plan to use the discrepancy in quality between the two kinds of footage as an "intentional" effect).
Three other questions: After reading another discussion thread, I got JES Deinterlacer to see if it could successfully convert my NTSC to widescreen 24p. The small clip I used was glacially slow to convert, which is frustrating but could be an acceptable workaround except that it appears the result is severely degraded (which makes sense since the file size is 10% of the original). My original thought was to crop the top and bottom of the 4:3 to fit it in with the 16:9 (instead of stretch it) and have the resulting increasing contrast in resolution be part of the inside/outside "effect." Can JES, or something else, solve my conversion problem? If so, will FCE be able to handle the result?
Second thing is one of my original XL2 tapes was lost so I took my iMovie version and put it back on tape through my GL2. Has this been degraded from the original? What is happening to the 24p, 16:9 data as it goes back and forth from camera to hard drive through iMovie and FCE.
Third is I found several threads that warn specifically against capturing from a Canon camera to a firewire hard drive. I seem to have had no problem so far, but is there something corrupt underneath that I can't see?
Hoping this long post is not too annoying (maybe my mistakes can help others avoid similar ones?) and that there's a miracle out there that'll keep me from crashing and burning in a fireball
Many thanks, Chris
G4 Dual 500   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

"There is not quality degradation for digital content upon printing to tape or copy, even from a iMovie version. DV is a already compressed digital material, edited in the compressed format, so you can go far beyond 20 generations of copy without significant degradation.
"It's not exactly the same thing with HDV (because there is a conversion by Apple Intermediate Codec at each capture/print process)."
Thanks, Michel. I guess I'm still confused about the gist of the capture process, which seems to be what led me into this mess in the first place. I understand that the raw data is digital and that it won't degrade if it's copied, which is what I thought capturing was in essence. But if DV capture is standardized, what—if it's not some kind of codec-translation filter—makes the resulting media files different depending upon which application (and camera?) is used. (I know cameras can record differently—thus my XL2/GL2 discrepancy—but do they also behave differently in the capture process?)
The other explanation I can think of for the differences in capturing between iMovie, FCE, and FCP is that Apple has simply restricted the aspect ratios and frame rates each app handles as part of the justification for differing prices. I had thought they could each accept the same raw footage but what they did with it afterwards was increasingly sophisticated and therefore costly.
Live and spend lots of money to learn!