File conversion for imovie? help!

hello i just got my new mac 3 days ago and i'm already frustrated and losing my mind!
i plugged in my digital camera hoping to edit some video clips i've been shooting. the pictures load fine in iphoto, and i even watched the video clips with quicktime, but imovie does not recognize the files! thus, i can't load them on there nor edit them. this stinks! unless i convert the files then imovie 08 is useless to me. the file shows up as .mov but stil don't work. i've spent the last 3 hours searching for free file convertors, and all of them are a bust. can anyone help me? any recommendations on a good program to change my .mov to mp4 ?
i'm beyond frustrated right now... really, i never thought apple would be this stubborn! i see i have the option of converting picture files (from .bmp to .jpeg) but there is no such option for video files.
please help!

You don't want to convert more than once.
QT Kirk is correct here. Your goal should be to not convert the video at all if you don't have to and only once if you must to get it into the editor. iMovie '06 will automatically convert the original clips in iPhoto as part of the "import" process as long as the files are "conversion" compatible with QT and any components you may have installed. iMovie '08, on the other hand, does not perform any conversions as part of a "Finder" level file import. Therefore, if you wish to import to iMovie '08, you will have to do some manual conversion. However, what actually has to be converted may simply depend on the content of the source file.
1) An MPEG (MPEG-1) or MPEG (MPEG-2) "muxed" file would have to convert both audio and video content to make it compatible with iMovie '08.
2) A Casio AVI, Kodak MOV, or other digital files containing M-JPEG, MPEG-4, H.264 video with DVI ADPCM or µ-Law audio compression would only have to have its audio content converted. In the case of MPEG-4 and H.264 files, this can be done by using GarageBand to access the "Movie to MPEG-4" export option and "Pass through" the video while only converting the audio content. In the case of M-JPEG files, the audio track can be extracted, converted, and used to replace the original sound track if you have QT Pro available.
3) QT MPEG-4 slideshow exports can be made iMovie '08 compatible by simply placing the audio/video content in an MP4 container with MPEG Streamclip (free) which strips it of incompatible "Tween" track or manually delete the track with QT Pro.

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Thanks for the great feedback.
I do have struggles though in general, part of which originates from my camera itself.
My camera still has a tendency to record an interlaced effect even though my settings are confidently selected to progressive (I have 50i and 25p to choose from - 25p is my selection).
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File conversion for imovie? help!

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