Should have read the label before I bought it

I'm an absolute beginner at FCE (I've opened the box, that's about it). I have occasionally produced videos using iMovie 09 but found it a bit limiting so thought I'd go up a notch. I don't want to spend much (any) more money because my forays into movie production are few and far between and the ROI on spending lots of money would be years.
I've just bought the software and loaded it up. Now I'm about to start some of the tutorials when I get a mo'. The Mac's I want to use are a G5 running 10.4.11 and a MacbookPro running Leopard. With the software I bought a couple of books and have started to read one by Tom Wolsky called "Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop". A few pages into this book I started to worry that perhaps I've done the wrong thing. The first major problem appears to be that the output from FCE is going to be pretty useless unless I buy a studio monitor (or at the very least plug in a TV). So I had a look around and these things seem to come it at around £1200 plus! Also, reading some forum posts, it seems you have to shell out another grand or so to buy a capture card to drive the video monitor, and we haven't even got onto sound yet. Eeuuw!
I have a TV I could use. It's a Samsung HD which has SCART, HDMI and a "PC" interface (the latter a 15 pin D connector). My camcorder is a Panasonic HDC TM-700. Tom says you should plug the camcorder into a firewire port and the video monitor (TV) into the camcorder; but the camcorder doesn't have a firewire connection so it appears I can't put it between a Mac and the monitor (TV).
So question 1 is: am I going to be able be able to use the TV as a monitor without spending a lot of money? I should say that the G5 has an ATI Radeon 9600 card in it with Dual DVI connectors, one driving a 30" monitor, the other one isn't in use.
Question 2 is: if I don't use a video monitor (or TV) am I wasting my time altogether?
Question 3 is: I'm not too bothered about editing HD, SD should be fine for my purposes. However, should I want to work in HD it seems that I can only capture HD footage on an Intel Mac. I do have the MacBook Pro which is Intel. If I do the capturing on the MacBook Pro can I then bring it over onto the G5 to work on?
Thanks in advance. Sorry if these are daft questions.
Bob.

Thanks for coming back to me. Your suggestions and answers are very valuable.
Although I have the Panasonic TM-700 most of the video work comes to me from a client's Sanyo Somethingorother camcorder. It's mainly instructional stuff about the equipment his company makes. They arrive on a memory stick, usually as MP4 files at 1280 x 740 or 640 x 480 (he gets confused with buttons so you never know what's coming). My job is to cut them up to make a meaningful 'story' and add titles, transitions and background music, the final movie is then delivered either via YouTube (which I embed into his website) or occasionally on looping DVDs for kiosks at trade shows. I also embed some of his movies into Flash presentations. It's not colour critical work, as long as the viewer can understand what's going on.
There are a few things wrong with using iMovie for this. The model of MBP that I have doesn't handle transparent PNGs properly (discussed elsewhere on these forums) so titling and watermarking using these files isn't possible (unless I take the job home and do it on an iMac, which is a pain).
I import a lot of stills and iMovie seems to make a mess of these, washing out the colours and generally making them look terrible, again lots of others seem to complain about this.
There are other things I find limiting. I'm hoping FCE will resolve these issues.
98% of my work is DTP and web design and the G5s are still very capable for this. However I will upgrade them later this year to MacPros which should be a better vehicle for video work as well. I can use the MBP but it tends to go out of the office for days at a time so not really practical.
Anyway thanks for your help, I'll go on and do the tutorials and see how I get on with FCE on the G5, without a video monitor or TV for the time being at least.
Bob.

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