iMovie and Importing from a camcorder

I have a Canon Legria HV40 camcorder. I've many hours of documentary video footage recorded on MiniDV tape.

I am having an issue with transferring the footage to the Apple computer.

Frames are being lost when transferring footage. The frames that are lost are always (as far as I can tell) at the beginning and end of each clip. I'm not sure if clip is the right word here but I'm understanding a 'clip' to be created every time I start and stop recording on the camera.

I tried iMovie '09 (Full, recording to a FireWire HDD) and for every clip iMovie systematically loses the first half second to full second of the beginning and end of each clip as recorded on the camera.

I checked the playback on the camera and all of the information that should be there is there, and plays back on the LCD or on a TV without problem.

I tried QuickTime to see if behaved better; it did. Less seconds and frames were lost, but still some frames were lost.

I tried Final Cut Pro and the situation was better again. However still one or two frames at the beginning of some clips were lost.

Is this all normal? What am I doing wrong? Please help me, I'm desperate and have about 20 hrs of tapes to go through!

Thanks!!!