QT movies -- iMovie 5.0.2 look terrible. Why? Help!

I've been adding (dragging to the clips pane) high-quality, good looking QT movies (24 fps and 29.97 fps) generated by several pro animation studios. The movies look great playing from QT itself, as well as from within Logic Pro (which I'm using to score the music for them). But when this footage is brought into iMovie 5.0.2, backgrounds become splotchy, edges become aliased, images look grainy... basically the movies just end up looking bad.
When I start a new project, I set the video format to MPEG-4. The frame rate of the project is 29.97. And setting the playback prefs to different qualities doesn't seem to appreciably alter the picture quality.
Am I doing something wrong here? If so, please point the way...
Thanks.

iMovie is a video edit app meant to work with firewire connected miniDV camcorders
that said, you know, why a 24fps is NOT supported natively by iM - it supports only NTSC/PAL … 720x480/30fps/interlaced.... and its native codec is DV…
good looking QT movies …generated by several pro animation studios
yepp, I've downloaded too all Pixar clips from its website… ;-))
"QT movie" does not tell, which internal codec is in use; a nice delivery format is mpeg in its many flavors (mp4, dvix, h264…) - such files look excellent in playback - but importing them into iM for any further "processing" drops down quality immediately… a computer has to "estimate" content when converting from mp2 to dv.... that is a lossy process……
I'm in the process of creating a website about codecs, if you're interested to waste half in hour in reading, have a look: CODEXX
plus a few other "effects": you don't see final quality within iM… a) it has some playback prefs, you have to set manually, b) as said above, it is meant for TV - a computer can just vaguely emulate that… (no interlacing......)
to get the max of quality with iMovie, choose DV… as import format, as project format, as export format in any other app which should deliver to iM…

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