How does iMac name the video files? Is there some kind of logic to the naming of the videos that I am not aware of?
To add a bit to what Winston has already said... Files imported via the "Import from Camera..." option are typically files captured from a camcorder or a device which iMovie '08 considers to be a camcorder. Thus the prefix "Clip-". Theoretically, the "2007-12-01 14;51;04" represents the date time group when the files was imported or the "time stamp" from the recording device which may or may bear any resemblance to a factual time. And as was previously pointed out, the ".mov" is a standard extension signifying the file container type. Therefore "clip-2007-12-01 14;51;04.mov" is a file clip imported or created on the 1st of December in 2007 at 2:51:04 PM and placed in an MOV (generic) file container.
With regard to the file container itself, this is determined by the method of import. Files imported at the "Finder" level are imported with their original "Finder" name and in the same file container as the original file. Camcorder files, on the other hand fall into two separate classes -- those requiring some sort of conversion and those that don't. An standard definition DV file is imported in its original DV container since it does not require any conversion. Files encapsulated in MPEG (like HDV, AVCHD, or MPEG-2), however, need to transformed to make them "edit" compatible with iMovie '08. At the very least, the audio is demuxed to "elementary" AIFF file(s) resampled to 48.0 KHz with 16-bit sampling and is now in a "temporal" compression format. In the case of HDV and AVCHD, the video is extracted/converted and can then be merged/synchronized with the audio and saved. This merging and saving of diverse content is what produces the MOV file container in the same manner as using the "Save As..." file command in QT Pro. HDD SD content however must undergo additional processing. Since the 'muxed" MPEG2/AC3 content does not share a common time reference, a "time" track is added to the container for audio time reference and to reduce/minimize drifting between audio and video tracks, the modified MPEG-2 video (now essentially having been turned into an Motion-JPEG video) is provided with an internal track start and/or end time offset and the whole saved in the generic MOV file container.
