Importing video to external drive

Question

I'm new to mac's. Bought for video editing. Problem have bought an external Western Digital My Book that I exported my first video to. Done some editing and able to share direct from imovie HD 6 to iDVD ok. But when I just open iDVD to burn the same movie & select the WD My Book Ext HD the movie is greyed out. The WD HD has been reformatted to OS X format. Should I use the internal HD to work on the movie then just use the external to store the finished project. I bought the external to hopefully make the system work faster when editing rather than have the internal over worked with the operating system as well. This is how I used to edit on my Windows XP before. thanks for any help offered.
iMac 20" screen   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Welcome to iMovie Discussions.
What you're doing ought to work OK, because you seem
to have reformatted the WD My Book to Mac OS
Extended.
But have you incorrectly connected it via USB instead
of the required FireWire connection?
If connected correctly via FireWire, you should be
able to import directly to the external drive, edit
on that external drive, use the external drive as the
source for creating your burnable iDVD - though
you'll need lots of space (..up to 4.7GB..) on your
internal drive for creating the "disk image"
which iDVD will burn onto the actual DVD.
That's how I do it, and it works for me..
<Thinks..>
When you say you've "exported" your movie to your My
Book drive, iDVD wouldn't be able to directly burn
that "exported" movie: iDVD burns from within an
iMovie project because it reads the "project file",
which tells it which bits of which clips to change to
MPEG-2 format in order to create a DVD.
You can also use "Disk Utility" - in
Applications>Utilities - to burn a copy of anything
at all onto a DVD, but that won't necessarily burn it
in DVD video format ..i.e; you accidentally
might simply burn a data copy of your movie onto a
DVD, and that wouldn't be in the right format to play
on a standalone DVD player.
..What I mean is: make sure that iDVD has access to
your edited movie, and not to an
exported copy of your movie which has been
stored on your external drive.
(..Now I'll go and have a little lie down..)
Thank for the help. I have conected via Firewire so thats not a problem. but will check what format OS X i formated to, if I remember there was several format options? will double check this first.
Thanks
iMac 20" screen   Mac OS X (10.4.8)