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Recently I have got the JVC Everio hard drive compatible camcorder. It is saving the videos to the it is hard driver in the proprietary arrangement that required to be converted previous editing or importing. The choices are MPEG, DV steam, or Quick Time. The thing I want to know which will be best format for importing the iMovie.
According to that will totally depend on the project setting you have done. You have to choose the project settings at the time you start your project. According to me you should choose MPEG4 for importing if the project is same or as long as the project remains same. This will definitely give a smaller file size.
As far as I there is no perfect answer for your question, it is obvious that you have to set up an experiment where you can convert the sample video to different formats. After that you have to import them in to dissimilar iMovie project formats and then you have to analyze the quality you are getting. Through this you can find the perfect answer.
You can try to use the DV format because the DV format has the top most quality, since it is uncompressed and if it is compressed in a lossless format. But there is a drawback also that the size of these files are very large and that will fill the space of your hard disk very easily. If you are not concerned about the space the file is consuming then you should definitely go for this format.
Considering the personal experience, I am using the Canon S3 IS digital camera, it takes good videos with the good TV quality. At the time I download the video files and after that I play the files, the quality that come are nice and sharp. I thwarted, by the iMovie because at the time I have imported the video files in the project the quality of the video is dropping tremendously. It will be better to use iSight project.