Hi - I have just been beating my head against a brick wall for the last 3 hours trying to figure out how to import my MiniDV tapes through iMovie '08 and then move them to an external hard drive. 
Unfortunately I cannot connect both the camcorder and the external drive to the computer at the same time because they are both Firewire 400 (and I am using a MacBook Pro - which only has one FW400 port).
My external drive shows up in the Event Library pane with a yellow triangle with an exclamation point - and no explanation about what that means! So I am quite frustrated.
The drive works perfectly throughout the rest of the system. So, I tried moving the files using Finder but they were not accessible other than by re-importing them to iMovie '08 which defeats the purpose! (btw - when reimporting the external drive is not an available option for where to import to - but my iDisk is!! How does that make sense!?!)
I tried to see if you could use the Option key when starting iMovie to select a different 'library' (similar to iPhoto) but no luck there.
You would think that given the size of video files, being able to use an external drive would be quite straightforward - but apparently my thoughts are off base.
Anyone out there know how to solve this problem?
Thank you,
Jose
Unfortunately I cannot connect both the camcorder and the external drive to the computer at the same time because they are both Firewire 400 (and I am using a MacBook Pro - which only has one FW400 port).
My external drive shows up in the Event Library pane with a yellow triangle with an exclamation point - and no explanation about what that means! So I am quite frustrated.
The drive works perfectly throughout the rest of the system. So, I tried moving the files using Finder but they were not accessible other than by re-importing them to iMovie '08 which defeats the purpose! (btw - when reimporting the external drive is not an available option for where to import to - but my iDisk is!! How does that make sense!?!)
I tried to see if you could use the Option key when starting iMovie to select a different 'library' (similar to iPhoto) but no luck there.
You would think that given the size of video files, being able to use an external drive would be quite straightforward - but apparently my thoughts are off base.
Anyone out there know how to solve this problem?
Thank you,
Jose