Good advice. You’ll lose a

Good advice. You’ll lose a little quality, but not as much as if you started to edit the mpeg files.

You might even be interested in buying one of those adapter boxes, where you plug your composite ("RCA") outputs from the camera into it, and it outputs on firewire into your computer. Again, you get that quality drop, but it will be edit-able, and better than trying to edit the DVD’s.