Match sequence settings to clip settings should avoid rendering, right?

wonderful. I'm working on a project for a client and someone in their AV department specified that videos needed to be 4:3 at H.264. I've never had so many problems with a format or codecs before, I really don't know what the best solution is to make editing efficient and keep the quality high with the specified formats. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Ok - per some other boards and suggestions, I used MPEG Streamclip to do some conversions, but I don't think that works to convert to ProRes NTSC, right? How do you suggest making that conversion?

Thank you again for your help and follow-up, I greatly appreciate it!

Update:

I downloaded the Pavtube HD Video Converter App (it costs $35, but it seems worth it). It has a setting menu specefic to mediums; one for Finalcut Pro that includes an option for Apple ProRes. I used the ProRes HQ setting and left the size as original (remember I captured in 4:3). When I put into Finalcut, however, I get a message that says it is not optimized for Finalcut and, once again, I have a rendering issue. However, if I go back to Pavtube and export again, this time changing the ProRes options to resize at 1920x1080, I can import into Finalcut with no problem and no rendering. The catch is that in Finalcut, my video is now stretched to fit widescreen and unfortunately the 1920x1080 is the only size I've been able to export as and then import into FCP without any problems. This is resolved when I export using quicktime convesion and set the size back to 4:3 (shown in screen shot), but brings up another problem - squished text.

Just now seeing other posts to my questions...I will try those suggestions. Thank you!

Michael, I can't thank you enough!

Compressor worked like a charm - I've included a screen shot of the settings I used; please let me know if they should be tweaked any way for higher quality. The clips exported in the .mov format and when I dropped it into a new FCP sequence, no need to render and it's the correct 4:3 ratio!

Thank you all for your time and help! Saved me from a very bad headache!

Ah! I see! Ok, did that. The quality looks awful though. I realize it isn't HD, but it should be THIS bad...I'm not even sure this screen grab will reveal it, but it looks very grainy and there is some weird zig-zagging happening in the background.

I'm previewing the orignal .AVI files and they look terrible. Now I'm panicked that the quality of the orignal video is bad, which doesn't make sense to me how that's possible on such a great camera. The video of course looked clear as a day in the camera previewer; I'm hoping the grain I'm seeing is just due to the file format in preview?