so in case anyone cares i think i finally found a way to do this.
so after some intense googleing i found that im going to need this mpeg-2 plugin shit. i downloaded utorrent and found two torrents that should work. after around 20 minutes of the torrents doing nothing i found out that utorrent on mac blows. SO I switched to Transmission which I am very happy with now. I downloaded the first torrent, restarted my computer and saw that i can now play mpeg's. Woo! After dancing for a bit I dragged all my files into FCE. It all loaded in and i put some stuff on the timeline just to play with. Annnndddd nothing. I am now sad. some more googeling and I find FC doesnt like mpeg. I have to convert it to DV. didnt know this. so whip open steamclip that evan so kindly refereed to me. Again thank you. I convert a clip to DV and put it into FC. sure enough. Sound! hazza!
Mind you the learning curve on this thing is like a cliff to me. im just happy I got this far. any other tips would be appreciated. thanks