Why did IMovie 9 start crashing when trying to import from camcorder

Question

I have Imovie 8.0.6 and a Panasonic HDC-SD60 camcorder. I have been importing from this camera for a long time, with no problems but now, IMovie crashes whenever I push the import button. I checked and when nothing is connected, the internal camera comes up when I push the import button. I connect the Panasonic first & see it on the desktop & then open Imovie. ANy idea why it keeps crashing?

Answer 1

Yes,  20 GB is very little - when you import you produce AIC  files which are much larger than the original clips.  Unless you can clear a lot more space (tens of GB) you need an external hard drive to put your iMovie media on.
This is the  AVCHD file structure you should see from the Finder when you connect your camera like an external drive:
First copy the clips you want to use from the STREAM folder to another folder on your hard disk.
Next, you need to convert them from .mts to .mov format using the free program Media Converter.  You can also do batch conversions by dropping multiple .mts files onto its window.  You need to instal the Re-wrap AVCHD for Quicktime - uncompressed Audioplugin.  It is fast since it is not transcoding but simply changing the video wrapper.  The website is:
http://media-converter.sourceforge.net/
The resulting .mov clips will import into iMovie (this works for iMovie 9 - I'm assuming it will also work with iMovie 8.)
Geoff.