I'm buying a Mac to edit video for work.

Mac is nonnegotiable because we want to do it in iMovie.

The apple pricing scheme is pretty simple, it's linear all the way from the Mini's to the quad G5 powermacs.

The Powermacs are a bit rich, we're looking for around 1500, so it'd probably be either of the iMacs. Are those decent? Should we upgrade the memory? Or should we suck it up and go the Powermacs?

I do TONS of video editing and I wouldn't touch anything that uses a proprietary codec, *cough* <MAC>...

True, they used to have a corner on the market as far as video editing goes, but if you're not going to go "balls-to-the-wall" and get an AVID or something similar, I'd choose something like a good Pentium based (preferably dual-core Pentium) and use MPEG/DVD instead of something like iMovie that is only going to replay with Quicktime...

just my humble .02, nothing more...

The issue is really that we're getting a bunch of non technical people doing this work (public health researchers); so we needed idiot-proof software; ergo iMovie.

We aren't doing anything complex; we shoot interviews and then stitch together the interesting parts for a distribution version.