How do i put clips in order by filename?

Question

I have over 500 clips of footage of a single event that I saved on my external. It equates to about 10 hours. I renamed every file in order (001, 002, 003...) but when I import into iMovie all the files are not arranged in order. Is there a way to organize all the clips by filename? I cannot do it manually since I cannot recall the order of every single clip.

Answer 1

I would recommend that you not rename your clips. When a clip is made on a camera, it is given a name by the camera that helps iMovie know the date and time it was shot. If you leave the names alone, your clips will be imported and sorted by date and remain in order.
When you remove the metadata by renaming the clips, iMovie will use the date the clip was most recently modified. If you used a batch rename utility like A Better Finder Rename (which I use), it may not save them in order, so the result in iMovie would be to make the clips out of order.
Do you know the date and time these clips were shot? If so, I would recommend renaming them back.
If you have "A Better Finder Rename", you could do this quickly.
You want to load the clips,  in "A Better Finder Rename". Then, batch convert the filenames in the form
clip-YYYY-MM-DD HH;MM;SS.ext
clip must be exactly as shown, in lower case. Must be dashes between clip and the year, month, day. Then a space. Then semicolons between hours minutes seconds.
Ext should be the current extension. Do not change it.
hh should be in 24 hour time.
If you know the date, but don't know the exact time of the clips, use A Better Finder Rename to increment the minutes by (say) 1 minute for each clip (or whatever makes sense. Do 59 in this way. Then increment the hours and do another 59 minutes. Until you have all 500.
By the way, iMovie does not have a clip renaming feature, but Final Cut Pro X does. If you frequently need to rename files in your workflow, you might want to look into Final Cut Pro. There is a big learning curve, but it has a lot more features than iMovie.
Here is a link for A Better Finder Rename. I use it a lot for photos, but I don't use it for iMovie.
You can also get it in the Mac App Store.
Of course you could rename manually, but it could take a while.