If you're a Linux or Windows convert, and you have a big library of either .DV files (Kino in Linux) or .AVI files (i.e. DV-AVI files, not to be confused with regular .AVI movies), I've found a much faster way to import them into iMovie. (There is a previous hint about this, but it appears to work for an older version of iMovie. The following is for using with iMovie 09+.)
First, make sure that you have the right kind of files. If you were using Kino in Linux (or perhaps some other video editing tool in MacOS), you have files with a .dv extension. Those are "raw" DV files and will work fine.
DV-AVI files also work and do not require conversion. These are not Windows AVI movies. These are actually DV files with an AVI wrapper around them. You would probably only have these if you imported video in Windows using something like Pinnacle Studio (what I was using prior to converting to Mac). Kino in Linux can also make DV-AVI files instead of its default .DV files. It's also possible that this will work only with Type 1 DV-AVI files; Type 2 files, where the audio file is in a separate file, may not work.
OK, so you have a bunch of directories with DV or DV-AVI files to import. Each directory that you're going to import is going to become an event, so make sure they're organized the way you want them to be organized.
Then, for each directory containing files you want to import into iMovie, do the following:
$ cd /path/to/dir/to/import $ mkdir "iMovie Cache" $ mkdir -p "iMovie Thumbnails/iMovie Cache"(The -p tells the second command to make any parent directories it needs to, so it makes the iMovie Thumbnails directory first, then creates the iMovie Cache directory.)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091128151647656