I don't want i-movie to import in date order!!

Question

Because i-movie downloads in date order, and because many of my old edited films still have the that data on individual clips, all my old films are imported unedited. This is crazy - I just want to download in the order they appear on the tape. Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Answer 1

I found a way to deal with this if you are comfortable using the command line.
I wrote an awk script to rename all the clips in a given folder in the order that they were imported based on info I learn from another posting here (thanks, randman). iMovie orders clips by filename, so I forced the clip filenames to be in the order I wanted.
Steps (after you do the prep work, below):
Quit iMovie
In Terminal:
cd <the directory where your clips are>
(such as ~/Movies/iMovie Events/Tape 20 - use finder drag to set the directory)
ls -l
(Make really sure that you are in the right directory! Should be lots of clip-* files)
~/bin/do_cliplist
(this will show you the mv commands that will rename the clips)
~/bin/do_cliplist | sh
(this will actually do the renames)
Start up iMovie - it will rescan that movie directory, then the clips in the specific event will be in imported order.
Sounds good? Here's the prep work...
Prep work:
I created a "bin" directory at ~/bin and placed the two files in it (you can use any text editor to create them):
iMac:~ laurie$ cd bin
iMac:bin laurie$ ls -l
total 16
-rw-r--r--  1 laurie  laurie  322 Nov 15 19:24 cliplist.awk
-rwxr-xr-x  1 laurie  laurie   46 Nov 15 19:27 do_cliplist
iMac:bin laurie$ cat do_cliplist
#! /bin/sh
ls -tr | awk -f ~/bin/cliplist.awk
iMac:bin laurie$ cat cliplist.awk
BEGIN          {
     year=2000;
          month = 1;
          day = 1;
          hour = 0;
          minute  = 0;
          second = 1;
/^clip-/          {
          printf "mv '%s' ",$0;
          printf "'clip-%-4.4d-%-2.2d-%-2.2d ",year,month,day;
          printf "%-2.2d;%-2.2d;%-2.2d.dv'\n",hour,minute,second;
          second++;
          if (second == 60)
                    minute++;
                    second = 0;
          if (minute == 60)
                    hour++;
                    minute = 0;
Make the do_cliplist executable:
chmod 755 ~/bin/do_cliplist
And you are ready to go...
The above worked for me using iMovie 9.0.8 on a recent iMac running 10.8.2 - the good news it that once you have the scripts set up, doing the reorder is completed in seconds.
Hope this helps someone, but it was worth the hour or two it took for me to hack it together for me to get a couple tapes imported the way I wanted...