HOW TO IMPORT MTS FILES INTO IMOVIE USING DISK IMAGE

While this works great for iMovie 08, there is an easier way for iMovie 09 and iMovie 11.

You can create a folder somewhere on your system. It can be an external drive or an internal drive. Name the folder something meanful like AVCHD from Birthday Party 2011-10-02. Then drag the entire contents of your SDHC card to this folder. If using a hard drive camera, drag the entire contents of the hard drive to this folder.

To import into iMovie, use FILE/IMPORT.../From Archive.

This method works just like the disk image method, but it has the advantage that you do not waste space. A Disk Image will always need to be larger than the files you are copying. By moving to a folder, you take the exact space you need.

That extra space taken up by the Disk Image is due to the mechanism used by Disk Utility to calculate the total size of your original hard drive or memory card. You might have only shot 4Gbytes worth of material onto your camera's 320GByte hard drive. But Disk Utility doesn't make that distinction. It makes an exact copy of the Whole Hard Drive Volume from the very beginning to the very end including all the empty space. Same is true of a memory card. So AppleMan1958's recommendation is the most efficient and disk space saving option especially for someone that might have a big hard drive inside their video camera or a very large (say 64Gbyte) memory card.

You can set a Custom Size for a disk image and set it to R/W and get it pretty close to the size you need, but you will inevitably have some wasted space.