DV Camcorder as passthrough or converter box for analog import to iMovie?

Greetings,
I've read a lot of posts about doing analog to DV conversions, but would still appreciate some comparitive comments about what tends to work better in terms of preserving analog video quality when imported into iMovie.
I'm doing the conversion with a Pinnacle Movie Box (wish I'd read the posts from the Pinnacle skeptics before I bought it); the VHS, which looks decent played on a TV, seems to be suffering badly in the transfer. Also, there are vertical black bands at each side of the frame in iMovie and a horizontal band of skewed video at the bottom. Is that a ratio or scanning problem? Or???? Any way to correct?
Thanks for all the great posts. Couldn't do it without you all.
BnB

I wanted to let you know that I made a practice dvd today, sampling edited clips from four different sources of imported vhs video--some of it 16mm dubbed to video around 20 years ago--into iMovie. I worked in the update of 6 to see if the application had stabilized at all. I've been working only in 5.0.2 recently.
I was pleasantly shocked at how much better the video quality was than on the computer--as you foretold. I really couldn't tell a visual difference from the source videos. What a relief! But do you work with that disparity, the difference between computer and TV, without a live TV monitor as you go? It's hard to make decisions on the basis of how it looks on the computer.
Other encouraging news: the garble around the edges didn't show at all on the TV screen. In the meantime, I'd been trying the plug-in you recommended. I'm glad I won't need to it for all this video after all, but I'm curious to experiment more with it. Any other plug-ins you'd recommend?
Thanks again for your generous response.
On a roll,
BnB

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