IMovie and an external hard drive

I recently bought an external hard drive to help with the stirage problems involved with iMovies. I successfully copied the imovies to that drive. However, when I try to run the movies, everything starts but only gors for a second or two and quits. The beach ball appears and eventually moves the movie to the next clip. This continues as long as I let it. Obviously, I don't know anything about using the backup drive. Is there a simple or involved answer to my problem?

All may not be lost. It's possible that you've got an external USB enclosure holding a drive with an IDE interface. If this is the case, you can easily buy an external firewire box (over here, these cost about £25) and remount the drive inside that.
I've got a combo enclosure - USB2 and Firewire. When used with my Mac mini (FW400) the firewire is nearly twice as fast. Perhaps I should be saying the USB interface is twice as slow - since it is a very poor USB implementation (not designed for use for HDDs) on Macs.

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    7string48 wrote:
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    Rheopaipo wrote:
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    toekoms wrote:
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