Import Directly onto External Drive?

Up 'til now, I've mostly used iMovie for making really fancy slideshows.
I recently got a new 250GB LaCie drive to go with my first miniDV camcorder.
I got the drive installed and formatted correctly. I also know how to tell iMovie where to save my project (obviously, my new drive).
What I'm not sure about is whether I can connect my camcorder directly to my external harddrive's extra Firewire port or if it's better to just connect it to the port on my eMac. I'd like to connect it to the HD since it's out of the way and I could leave the cord connected...and I would assume that doing so would make the most sense since the clips are ultimately going to reside on the HD.
But I'm not sure if iMovie application (which still resides on my Mac) will see the camcorder if it's not connected directly to my Mac.
I guess I could just plug it in and see...but on the off chance the iMovie only like camcorders connected directly to the Mac, I don't want to risk bogging down my computer and/or making it crash as it wonders what I did.

Alypius,
"What I'm not sure about is whether I can connect my camcorder directly to my external harddrive's extra Firewire port or if it's better to just connect it to the port on my eMac."
I suggest using a separate FireWire port for the camera.
I've had problems in the past when daisy chaining my camera onto an external drive. Pulling the data in from the camera while simultaneously pushing it back to the drive is a lot for one FireWire port to handle.
I also don't like the idea of plugging and unplugging devices into the hardrive's port while the drive is mounted. In theory it should work, it just makes me nervous about corrupting the drive.
"and I would assume that doing so would make the most sense since the clips are ultimately going to reside on the HD"
The data is still being processed by the computer before it is written to the drive. So there's really no inherent advantage.
Matt

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