Why do I have to make disk image of AVCHD to import into iMovie?

Question

iMovie imports AVCHD format file structure from the camera quite easily. (or so I hear, I have not done so myself yet). I have footage from the camera saved to an external hard disk which I want to import into iMovie08. I am a newbie to Apple/Mac things. From these fora I learned that I need to make a disk image of the AVCHD directory and mount it. I did that and it seems to work.
But this process is painful. For the 12Gig save I made on 27Jan08, the disk utility took forever to make a disk image. It failed once complaining lack of disk space. I thought the firewire external disk was overwhelmed by IO and copied the directory to the internal disk, and made a disk image. I thought it was hung after about 15 minutes killed the diskutility. I had a corrupted image file. Then left diskutility running overnight and seems to have finished the job. This morning iMovie looked at the disk image and is estimating it is going to take 3 hours to bring it in. May be it is transcoding to a more editable format like mpeg-4 or something.
Why do I have to jump through so many hoops to make iMovie recognize the AVCHD structure? Why can't I just drag a AVCHD directory into iMovie and make it read it? If I can reclaim the 24 gigs in the internal disk at the end of the process, I guess I can live with it. But, come on, copying 12 gigs over Firewire, another hour to make a disk image... I was expecting better user experience than this. (Did I mention I am newbie for Apple? Recent refugee from the vistaland)

Answer 1

AppleMan1958 wrote:
I would not recommend waiting until you have 12GB of AVCHD (which might import as 120GB of AIC). You could lose it all if your camera is dropped. I suggest you get in the habit of importing from your camera on a regular basis.
I agree, it is not a good idea to accumulate so much footage in the camera. But these were downloaded from the camera way back before I even bought the iMac. At that time, the only device that can deliver 1920x1080 video to my shiny 50inch TV in the living room was the camcorder! (and the OTA antenna). So I kept the clips in the camcorder, even after taking regular backups to the hard disk. That way I can show the clips to friends and family in full HD glory!
BTW 12 Gig is just 2 hours in HD. It is not much. I dread bringing my second backup 4 hours of our trip to Anguilla, St Marten etc. We all know HD requires ooodles and oodles of data and storage. I am not really complaining about the disk usage. My most important beef was: iMovie imports AVCHD from the camera easily. But it is unable to start from a AVCHD folder in the internal hard disk and start reading it. I can burn a DVD-ROM with AVCHD directory in the root and it reads it. I can copy AVCHD folder to the root of a thumbdrive and it reads it.
But put the very same AVCHD deeply nested in the external drive it barfs.
I am going to experiment after going home. I will create a symbolic link to the AVCHD folder from the root of the external disk. Heck, I am root here, I can even do an ln -s /nested/directory/deep/in/the/external/drive/AVCHD /AVCHD
and see if I can fool iMovie to import the files without creating a diskimage. If someone who has immediate access to iMac would do the experiment it would be very helpful