Need advice with HDV 900 setup

So, got my hands on a rented HD panny 900 setup yesterday, shooting in Millenium Park.
Shot 1080 /60 24p.

We have the camera at the studio now, and are testing how to import the footage from the camera and how to set up the FCP system. Couple questions (okay five questions):

1: we connected a firewire cable to the camera and the Apple, directly. We opened up the easy setups in FCP and selected DVCProHD firewire, opened a project in the same HD settings as the shot footage, opened the logging and capture window. We got live camera picture, we can press the transport controls on the camera and play back the tape and capture using the "capture now" button. The capture window shows transport controls as for deck controls, which you can press.... but they do nothing: we can't control the camera transport from the mouse.

Looking over the switches and menus of the camera, I could not find any obvious switch or menu that let me have remote deck control of the camera over firewire. Then again, the really "helpful" manual for the camera took 120-odd pages to get around to telling me you have to push and HOLD the menu button for 3 seconds to get into the menus that set your HD options, so maybe I need to find the headpiece for the Staff or Ra and wait for the sun to be at the right angle or something to find the settings I need for remote deck control by firewire?:-)

2: Does this camera record only HD, and never any SD? Meaning, could we deliberately use it to shoot in DVCPro25 or DVCPro50 mode? I could find no menus for that, and now I'm wondering if we could do those things when recording to external Firestore. I understand you can get HD tape for it, we just used regular 66-minute DVCPro25 loads, which ran at double speed so the 66 becomes 33. Is there some advantage to the more expensive "HD tape"? We kind of like not having to carry multiple flavors, since we still do a lot of SD work here and have lots of DVCPro25 gear that sues the same tape stock.

3: Camera monitor-out settings and SD downconversion: I did not have the manual with me in the field and I found the menu switchology for this part non-intuitive, so please help me out: The camera has two BNC monitor output spigots and what I would like for one to be SDI to go to my Portable HD monitor, and the other to be Analog SD anamorphic or letterbox that could be seen on a cheaper and more plentiful analog monitor.

I could not make that happen. I could only seem to get SDI out of both spigots simultaneously. I am doing something wrong, please straighten me out.

5: Back to FCP now. We're playing with video output settings in the AV menus. What I want to have happen is FCP to send the pix thru the AJA IO and then out as component SD video to a betacam deck and component monitor. We have this going now, but the down-convert that happens on the fly looks really poopy: horrible moire' effects in detail areas, all manner of ugliness. When I stop the timeline, the picture reverts from full-screen anamorphic look to a still of the HD picture but only one upper corner of the frame shows, though the part you *can* see is nice. Step-framing looks great. Playback in realtime doesn't.

I get it that I'm asking the machine to cross-convert HD to SD on the fly during playback off the timeline, so maybe my expectations are too high? But really, I expected a gorgeous SD picture with some hit in resolution thrown in.


How we're planning to work with this stuff:
I want to edit the spot in full HD first, then render out an SD 4:3 letterbox version and a full-screen SD version that will have to be "unsqueezed" by the TV station.
I will want to archive the HD version of the 30-second spot to a DVD as data.

Anyone willing to walk me thru the setup details, in depth? Here or offline? We're seriously looking at buying these cameras but want to get these questions answered first

Thanks for any and all help. I Cross-posted this question in the final cut forum, which I normally don't do, but it spans a couple issues so I needed to ask different sets of experts this time.