HD Camcorder and burning DVDs - Help!

Please forgive my lack of knowledge in advance!!

I am purchasing a new camcorder, most likely a Panasonic HC-V500, and will be taking home movies exclusively. When researching this camcorder I saw that it was not supported by Macs, but that there are some work-arounds.

Can anyone give me, simply, what steps I need to take to do the following:
1. Preserve the higher quality video afforded by the HD camcorder;
2. Plug the camcorder into the computer and upload those HD files;
3. Create a simple DVD playable on blu-ray DVD player (basically just raw footage)

With my previous (non-HD) camcorder I uploaded the files using iMovie then created a project, shared to iDVD and burned. It took forever and involved more steps than I felt necessary as I did not need to add music, breaks, titles, etc. Further I now get errors in iDVD (apparently because my project is long and I don't have enough space on my hard drive left), and as such, am 3 years behind in DVD-making. I have cleaned off my hard drive as much as possible (no other video is on the internal drive and I don't have any other non-standard programs except Microsoft Office).

Sorry for the rambling and thank you in advance!

Blueroom, I do have those electronics, but my home movies are of my family/kids so I do want to create dvd's for future viewing by them, etc. Thanks for the info about the dvd vs camcorder.

Should I consider a lower "p" camcorder which would obviously be less expensive?

Once I have Toast and an external burner, will the burned DVDs play on a separate BluRay dvd player or do I still need some other software? I keep seeing how people have problems with their burned discs playing back.

Thanks again