How Can I Use IMovie with 6TB of Home Movies?

Question

I have 6TB of home movies on a Thunderbolt WD hard drive.  Recently the thumbnails and video has stopped loading and I can't get IMovie to load it all up.  Is there any solution to use this much video with IMovie?

Answer 1

Thanks so much Karsten.   So the fact I'm doing all this now is basically a culmination of (a) old mini-DV technology which meant dealing with the tapes was a hassle for many years (b) Mom & Dad just taking alot of video of alot of the kids, family trips, births, parties, first day's of school, etc. over about a 15+ year period and (c) Now that we finally have the technology to start to deal with all these tapes WITHOUT making DVDs (I tried several years ago, just way to time intensive) and we have big hard drive technology relatively cheaply, I'm trying to tackle this.
The first step was importing 300+ min-DV tapes into IMovie, which took the better part of a year, on and off.  I now have three back-up drives of all that data.  (BTW, I am a die-hard MAC user so everything has to be MAC compatible). 
My primary goal for the near term is really not to try to craft neat summarized videos of family events.  That will come later.  The initial goal it to get all of this into some understandable and usable format.  For starters, when pulled up in Imovie, this 15 years of video all just comes out as a gazillion NEW EVENT 3-12-2004-type headings, organized chronologically, which is essential, but with no ability to really know what is what.  I've gone through about a third of the headings and renamed, merged and split them into events with names like Billy's Third Birthday Party or New Zealand Trip Day 5 or Sally's First Day at School, etc. etc.  No editing of the actual content what-so-ever at this point. 
What I have discovered, in the process, though, is that the kids LOVE to watch the unedited video of themselves as children...I have to turn it off to get them to stop watching.  Videoing them watching the video actually makes for great video, because they find it a laugh a minute, they vaguely remember various things and places and they have tons of questions about their past childhood.  That's largely what this record was kept for.
Thus, my immediate goal is to get it all into a format with Events all named properly so we know where important events are located, and from there, I'd ideally like to be able to convert key events to Iphone/Ipad/Apple TV mediums to the kids can watch some of it when they'd like - unedited. 
The next step (maybe a year or so down the road) is to actually start to try to make the edited "Christmas Party 1998" video, vs. just the raw footage, for the wider family and friends that participated.  A single edited video though can take hours and hours I've learned the hard way. 
The problem I'm having is that as I brought in the last 1TB or so of video (2010-2013) from my current Imovie library (which is all digital to start with, no mini-DV tapes involved), now IMovie has stopped loading all the thumbnails (it loads only a portion), so combining, merging, splitting and naming Events is very difficult. 
I tried importing it all into FCPX using the free trial, but I found that for whatever reason, instead of ordering things chronologically starting in 1996 forward, that the dates only start in 2012.  Somehow FCPX doesn't recognize the encoded date the video was shot, but instead the dates that I copied it onto my current hard drive.    Can't figure that out, but it makes it impossible to then organize things easily by date since all the events are scattered all around, instead of in chronological order.
Sorry this is long, but this is the problem I'm facing.  I'd really appreciate an expert's opinion of how to tackle this!:)