Using iMovie

Hello All. I'm new to mac. I have a new unibody, aluminum macbook. What a beautiful and powerful little machine this thing is. Everyday it suprises me with something else that is just easier, more intuitive and overall better than a windows machine.

Anyway, I really want to utilize the applications that come with it. So, I have some home movies that were recorded to mini DVD's. I cannot load these into the macbook's superdrive (only bummer btw but I was aware of this before I bought it.) so i've been loading them into my old windows machine and using Handbrake for Windows to encode them to MP-4 format. Then the files are transfered over to the macbook via external HD. No problems with any of this.

Now, I transfered the files directly into the iTune's "Movies" folder. Here's where i'm a little confused. When I import the file into iMovie, it says something like, "generating thumbnails" or something to that effect and says the process is going to take over 2 hours!!! I'm talking about a 20 minute, standard MP-4 file.

My questions to you guys are: Is iMovie an application for storing, organizing and viewing movies, or is it mainly used for just editing? If it can be used for just storing and viewing, why does it take this long? Could I be doing something wrong?

Also, in my iPhoto library I have a few small video clips that are .MOV format that were taken with the digital camera. Everytime I open iMovie, it promt me to generate thumbnails for these clips and again, says that it's gonna take like 2 hours to do. I have just been hitting the "later" button. What exactly is iMovie trying to do here? Thanks for your help.

 

Ok, great. Thanks for the replies. Now I have more movies to do. Some need some minimal editing. Would it be a better idea to convert them to something other than mp4 for ease of editing?