Importing AVI files

Hello. I've just switched over from the dark side to Mac and I need some help using FCE. Here are my basic questions:
1) Best settings/method for importing AVI files from a hard disk?
2) Best export settings for high quality use in powerpoint and/or DVD/CD?
Now for a little more info...
I work with athletes in the areas of sport science and performance. I have tons of video saved on multiple hard drives in AVI format that we did video analysis of technique using DartFISH. They were originally captured with good quality digital video cameras via DartFISH as AVI files. These are large files and high quality video (200-300 MB for a 1 min clip) .
RIght now, if I choose "import: from file" I get a message saying the clips are not optimized for FCE and I should recapture them. Unfortunately, all I have are the files on HD and not the original tapes, etc.
What is the best way to import the AVI clip files into FCE for editing? Settings, etc. Do I need to convert to a Mac-friendly format first with a third-party app like QuickTime Pro, VLC, MPEG StreamClip? Use iMovie?
My overall goal is to not lose quality/suffer degradation of the clips in the conversion, edit, export process. I'm not that concerned with file size, but I also don't really want to go through 3 or four steps and create multiple large files for the same clip.
My desired output is for continued work with athletes so they can take video home (DVD or CD of clips) to review and academic presentations (powerpoint). So seeing fine detail in the clips is important. An edit/output set-up that I will use a lot is merging two clips to play in a PIP, side-by-side, or overlay format. i.e., athlete A with perfect form on the left, athlete B with flaws on the right and the clips play simultaneously as one final output movie.
Is the basic Quicktime export function the best for my needs?
I've got a decent background in computers and basic video editing. Clip splitting, marking in/out, timeline, transitions, and other edit functions are no problem. My main area of weakness is all the different video formats, codecs, compression options, and other similar settings. There weren't many of those types of choices in my old system. I've produced some movies with FCE already, but the quality in the videos dropped from the original clips to final output.
Thanks,
TD...

Tom--
Thanks for the response. Using MPEG Streamclip solved my import problems. Using the default DV25 compression seemed to yield a file of similar size to my original AVI files. Is there much benefit in using the DVCPRO25 or DVCPRO50?
I'm still having some troubles with export format settings. Using the default Quicktime movie export, the finished clips looks to be fine in Quicktime. But using the .mov clip in Powerpoint yields some degraded quality. The picture appears to have "lines" and generally looks less crisp/clean. I thought this might have been just some Microsoft flaw in the Powerpoint movie engines, but I tried the same thing in Apple Keynote and got the same result. I have some screen shot image captures I could send you, but not sure how on the discussion board.

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