iMovie Crashing Problems

Well, I've been using iMovie for about 1 1/2 years now, and until a couple months back I've had 0 troubles. I'm running iMovie 09 from the new iLife. Works great in every aspect except for importing videos. I've had a Sony Steadyshot HDR-SR11 Camcorder since spring and I upload my videos into iMovie from it. I have 500+ video clips on the harddrive, and, when the import window is open, only the first 20-30 clips have a picture on their thumbnail. When I get down to the bottom of the list, I can't see which clips are which, so I have to double click the clip to see it. I do one just fine, but when I click on the next clip right afterwards, iMovie will normally freeze up and shut down after a couple seconds. This obviously gets very frustrating when I import a lot of clips. I can get through the problem if I take it slow when I click the next clip, but when I do this it takes much longer. Is there any solution to this? I'm thinking I might need to take my clips off the camcorder harddrive and save them on my computer if that will help.

Nothing too urgent, just a question if i can get some assistance. Thanks for any help I can get