iMovie stops 2 minutes short of full import

I'm trying to import from a DVD of a niece's recital. I don't have access to the camera it was taken with, so importing from that is not an option.

I did an initial web search to determine how to do this (I'm a fairly new Mac user) and found something that at first glance seemed to work well. I used the utilities and created a .cdr file and double clicked that - a window opened in iMovie that showed all of the clips (in 3 minute segments). I clicked on "Import All" and it did that with no problem.

When I went into iMovie after it was finished, I found that the last two minutes weren't there - in addition, although the rest of the movie WAS there, the clips seemed to be in a random order, not sequential as they should be. I proceeded to drag them into a project in the correct order then realized the end was missing (the most important part since it was a tribute to her late father). I rechecked the DVD and the .cdr and the last two minutes ARE present on both.

I then tried the process again and found that when the initial window opens it displays one hour of video (broken up into three minute segments). The total amount of time that I want to import is one hour and 2 minutes - and the last two minutes weren't included here in this window, which is why they weren't imported when I said to "Import All".

Is there some kind of limit on how much can be imported at once (60 minutes maybe)? Has anyone else seen this problem (or the problem of the clips being imported in no particular order)? I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, but obviously I don't know that for certain.

Is my best bet to instead try software to rip the contents of the DVD, then convert them to .MOV and import (or something similar)?

Any help that you can provide is greatly appreciated!!!!

THANKS!!
Gary