I can't write or access external HD with iMovie

I've read that some have success and others have not. I am one of the others who have not.
I'm recently new to iMovie and external HDs. I bought an external once I got iLife 08 so I can do some video editing. I want to have all my video on the external. That is no problem, I can easily transfer, but I can't write directly, or access my files from iMovie. I can import from external, but then it just creates an event on my boot drive and totally defeats the purpose of saving and working from the external.
What is wrong? I can see the drive in iMovie, but it has a little exclamation mark on the icon. I can't find what the exclamation error means.
I have an iMac, running to external via firewire, and the drive is FAT32. Do I need to reformat? Or does iMovie not allow direct write or editing from an external

FAT32
iMovie should not be used with a FAT32 disk; if you haven't put anything on the drive which you can't move off the drive and don't need to use it with a PC, you should use the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to reformat it to Mac OS Extended regardless of what you intend to use the drive for.
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