iMovie 11 doesn't like rewrapped AVCHD files, iMovie HD does.

I have some questions about iMovie 11.

I have a Panasonic HCV 100K camcorder. I usually shoot in the iFrame format but decided to use AVCHD yesterday. It gave me beautiful results, much sharper and brighter colors than what I've seen with iFrame (and I compared it with some footage of the same thing I'd shot with iFrame earlier that day.)

I made the (HX, highest quality AVCHD that the Panasonic makes) .mts files usable in iMovie HD by re-wrapping them as a Quicktime .mov files with Media Converter (http://media-converter.sourceforge.net/).

iMovie HD liked it. I could easily play, edit and export it and I'm happy with the results.

So, I thought I'd let iMovie 11 (9.0.4, OSX 10.6.8) export it to specs that Facebook would like. I first imported it as an iMovie HD project. Every time I tried iMovie 11 told me, after importing it in a flash, that the project was empty. No clips had been imported.

OK. Strike one.

I imported the converted .mov files into iMovie 11. That worked fine. Two problems developed then.

1) iMovie 11 does not tell you the file names of your clips so I had a very hard time trying to figure out the correct order they were shot in. Why doesn't iMovie 11 tell me the file name of my imported clips? It shows the date and time the clips were imported and as far as I can tell, does not show the actual creation date of the file, only the time it was imported as a WHOLE project, so all the clips have the same info.(I thew out those files so I can't go back and check. I can re-do this process is anyone wants me to.) Bad design, Apple. (I could be wrong about this. I didn't look that closely for every clip.)

2) Playback was so poor I gave up. Video would freeze often.

Strikes two and three. iMovie HD worked fine so I will continue to use it.

My question is, why couldn't iMovie 11 deal with these files? iMovie HD could. Why the empty projects and the eventual poor playback?

Here is some info on what I was working with:

Media converter makes that (AVCHD HX) .mts file into a .mov file with the following attributes:

Format: H.264, 1920 x 1080, Millions 16-bit Integer (Little Endian), Stereo, 48.000 kHz

FPS: 59.94

Data Size: 12.2.mb

Data rate: 9.25 Mbit/s

Current size: 1024x576 pixels

(This is for an older file. I threw out the files I was using yesterday.)

Thanks for any help.

Cheers,

John L