How'd you get on with this R-Type? Did anyone offer their services? Even if not it sounds like you're on the right track with just playing around with mixed results. I'm kinda in the same position as you and have played around heaps with mixed results to kinda find out what works best. Although I have a strong technical background so I found understanding media formats / codecs easy and had to experiment a lot with cinematography / lighting / sound / directing. Pretty much my recording skills because you can only edit as well as you record.
One of my mates uncles produces TV commercials so it was good to entice him infront of my computer (editing suite) with a splif and then bail him up and tap him for a bit of knowledge although it ended up progressing into a bit of a Mac vs PC discussion. Just by the way II totally blew all his Mac arguements out of the water apart from the point that Final Cut / Avid is more 'industry standard' which is important if you are working within the industry. (otherwise its not)
As far as ditigtal formats go AVCHD format if a fairly compressed form of HD and like all compressed media (mp3 / DV / jpg etc) for best results you'll need to absolutly minimise recoding data because each time you recode you introduce a certain loss of quality in the output. Don't forget your camera records it internally with a certain loss of quality so each time you rencode it after you record it the loss in quality gets magnified.
In effect you want to recode it once when you pull it from your camera and once again when you cut your master video and you need to try and recode it each time in a format that minimises the differences between your source and destination devices. For maximum quality you need to aviod any unnecessary intermediate recoding which basically means when you take source material and output it to a new format or medium .
As far as capturing goes it sounds like you need to get CS4 so you can edit AVCHD natively on your PC which will mean the files you capture to your PC don't suffer (any more) quality loss coming off the camera. You also want to create your sequence using integrated Affer Affects projects as embedded clips which will render it inline with Premier projects as opposed to rendering sequences in After Effects seperately and then using the exported files as imported clips in Premiere. When you are wanting to export the edited video you'll need to render it to match the output format. If its not it a matching format when you upload it (to youtube) or write it to external media (like a DVD) it will recode it again introducing more quality loss.
As far as workflow goes I normally capture to my PC as one big source file, import that into premier and then cut divide the source internally into usable clips within the Premier project. Then I can use those clips within another sequence in the same project which does not create any imtermediate source files. Premiere will will recode clips intermediately when you are previewing but when you export your final clip it will edit and proceess your RAW source files only once to create the output.
I hope that makes sense / helps?
Post some of your videos?
Heres a couple of mine which I was happy with:
The copy I have of this one looks much better on my 50" plasma than it looks on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KqXkALliwY
Ditto with this one I did with a song I sorta wrote a few years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3T8TMOkrYI
The video quality in this one is way better once I figured out a few techniques with regard to uploading it to YouTube. (Also youtube has gotten better with uploading since a few years ago.) The background noise isn't that good but no matter how much I tried to EQ it out once I'd recorded it it was hard to remove. (Turn it up a bit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VczRJSFBJFM 
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