Panasonic camcorders in iMovie 11

I have purchased two Panasonic camcorders for school use, the X920 and the WA03. The former is for teacher use (and occasional responsible students) and the later for student use. We will do a technology segment teaching middle school and high school kids how to use the camcorders and edit. The students would need to edit on one of the (new) Mac Minis in one of the labs or classrooms. I have iMovie 11 and iMovieHD 6 on all mac minis plus a list of conversion programs like Handbrake and MPEG Streamclip as well as iDVD for an option for completing projects.
The X920 creates AVCHD and iFrame clips and the WA03 creates MPG and iFrame clips. I've spent the day learning iMovie 11 as my experience is in iMovieHD, Final Cut Express and I even cut my teeth on FCP 1 in 1999. I've enjoyed learning iMovie 11 today though I avoided the 2nd reincarnation of iMovie for years. Today I read some frustrations that people have had with iMovie 8,9,11 with "color banding" or posterization. Perhaps I shouldn't worry about it with school projects, but the shooting options are a bit overwhelming. Frame size, progressive or interlaced, MPEG vs AVCHD vs iFrame THEN iMovieHD vs iMovie 11 (the other techie teachers wants to use iMovie 11). (I didn't like the looks of interlaced video in iMovie 11 Monitor Window playback.)...(Some editors say "do not use H.264.)
It would seem that the easy answer is just go with iFrame and don't worry about ultimate footage quality and edit with iMovie 11 with or without reduction in quality issues. If you have any suggestions on a format to use in either camera and the editing software, fire away. I'm a listening ear...for now. : )
Hopefully I've covered all the important considerations for any kind replies.

well that might be a common problem with camcorders and programs. Don't worry about it, there are dozens of video converter on the Net to solve your problems.
I used this video converter a lot to convert camcorder videos to programs as well as mobile devices. Maybe you can try it as well. Here's the guide of it, please check. remember, just convert the videos to iMovie .mov and you can edit videos well with iMovie.
wish my suggestion would help and good lck to you!
Lisa

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    Message was edited by: joeyc923

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    Message was edited by: shuggyboy2

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