That is essentially the whole idea behind doing a decompose.
When you do your decompose, simply tell it what kind of handles you want on the heads and tails of each clip. It will then create a new set of clips, that are offline (your originals will stay online) but those new clips will be broken up into the individual clips used to make up your sequence…including heads and tails.
If you had 1-30 minute chunk of video in offline, but only used 1 second of it in the edit, it will create a clip that is 1second long + what ever amount of handle you specified, and will ignore the other 29 mins and 59 seconds from the clip. Batch import or batch capture if coming off tape, and you can tell it what resolution to create the clips into this time.
Glenn