Handling video files from camera

I am shooting a large number of video clips (on a Panasonic Lumix) of our baby and need a solution for organizing & saving them all, not too concerned with editiing at the moment. I tried to copy them over from my camera to an external drive, however using Finder, I only get a single AVCHD file rather than the numerous clips. On the other hand, I can import them into distinct clips using iMovie, but they all get bundled together under one sub-menu, and it doesn't seem like an ideal format for organizing + archiving. What is the suggested approach?

It is a good question and I think if you ask 10 people you will get 10 different answers.  First of all which OS and iMovie version are you using?  (Is your OS really still 10.4.9?). 
Your mention of a single AVCHD file suggests to me that you are using OS 10.7 or above, where AVCHD directories appear as packages in the Finder.  If you right click and choose "Show package contents" you will see all the folders and files inside.
I personally take a backup of the AVCHD package from each memory card but for arrchiving and use in iMovie I take the .mts files out of the STREAM folder in the AVCHD directory and place them in folders with the still photos from the same day of shooting and labelled with the date.  In this way it is easy to drag related stills and clips into iMovie 10.0.1 as required. If you are using iMovie 9 you have to transcode the .MTS files first.  You may instead prefer the 'official way' of importing directly from the camera, memory card or AVCHD package copied to hard disk. However this way clips and stills are kept separated.
Apple seems to be promoting iMovie 10 as a repository for video but currently the options for organising  Events are very limited and less user friendly than in iMovie 9.

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