How to put video files on external drive for Final Cut Pro?

Sorry for the stupid post, but I'm on day one of trying out final cut pro. (Tired of the very limiting imovie) I have a Sony HD video camera and a Go Pro HD camera. I want to store all my video on my 1TB external drive and edit from it. How do I set that up? I'm not up on the lingo that's used in the program, nor can I figure out how to do this so far.
Thanks in advance.

Hiya mate, first off no such thing as a stupid post. Better to ask if you're not sure!
There are a lot of variables to think about, what codec you want to edit in, i.e. HDV, IMX, ProRes then there's frame rate, 25, 29.97 etc. Best practice is to work native to with the codec you've shot. i.e. if the camera is HDV ingest at HDV. If you want work at a higher codec, ingest or transcode to that codec then work with it in FCP. FCP works best with all assets at the on the same timebase and codec.
You also have to think about disk speed and bandwidth from the external HD to Mac. FCP will only be able to handle 'x' amount of streams and layers depending on the codec.
Anyways...bsck to the question at hand. Im not sure what camera you have shot in but if its HDV you easy set up to set your project to HDV/PAL/NTSC/25/29.97, then set your scratch location to the external drive, and then save your project (make sure you have named it correctly as the scratch location aka capture scratch folder, will be named with the same name as the project). Connect up the camera over firewire then go to log and capture (cmd+8) and ingest.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
SJ

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I have edited projects in Premiere Pro (on my PC) and I have tried to transfer them in FCP. It worked with the exception of two things:
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I thought what I would do is try compressing them again before I send them on over to DVDSPRO. Here is a simplified break down of the situation:
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Message was edited by: Pngwyn
Message was edited by: Pngwyn

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