Slow Import to iMovie

The other day I shot about an hour's worth of HD video at my granddaughter's band competition. I have a nearly-new Samsung HMX-X200 camera that I recently found out isn't all that compatible with Mac OS, but I can copy the video files to my hard drive and then import them to iMovie. The problem is that it takes about 4 hours to do that import once the files are copied to the desktop. The copy itself took something like 45 minutes, so before I can even touch the video for editing, I have nearly 5 hours invested. This seems like a long time - I'm not expecting instant gratification, but does this timeframe seem appropriate?

your computer not only copies the files, but does an automatic conversion to make it editable - this background process needs some time.
there are indeed some bottle-necks:
SDcard could be 'slow', Cam's usb could be slow
putting the files on the same drive doesn't add any benefit: the same read/write-head has to jump back'n forth to the two locations on the platter ...
in case, the AVCHD-structur is on some 'real' 2nd drive, preferrred firewire-connected, you would notice a (tiny) increase in speed.
most important: let enough room on INTERNAL drive! there's lots of 'swapping' going on, background processes which need some hidden 15-20Gigs at last .
What I noticed with my projects:
20x1min clips get faster imported than one solid 20min clip - why? no idea

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