iMovie and the external drive

[SoCal Surf]

Hi, you guys seem to be more on it than the apple forums so I'm hoping someone can give me some help here.

I'm trying to edit my daughter's soccer reel for college, so I've got all these games which are massive files, but I only need 10 seconds here and there to put together her reel. So here's my problem.
Sadly, my laptop has seen better days (Macbook Pro 2015, running 11.6.4), I love this computer, but the hard drive is jam-packed, which is why all the games are on an external drive.
What I would like to do is use the external drive as the source and to save the movies to, as in, every time I drag a game into iMovie it will save it on the external drive (I think that makes it the iMovie library for this project) and I'm editing as if the external drive is my internal drive. I do have movies in the iMovie library that are on my hard drive and I'd like to keep those there for now.
If that is possible (and I hope I'm explaining what I want to do properly) please post step-by-step instructions on how to set that up, and assume you are talking to an idiot...which according to my wife I am.
Thanks!

 

[bogdanw]

Rather than making a new iMovie library on an external drive https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203049
I suggest something else, use Avidemux http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/download.html or other software to cut from the massive video files the small fragments you need and use those in the current iMovie library.

 

[ColdCase]

Yeah, it is simply moving your internal iMovie Library to and external drive. Dunno what you mean by massive, but it could take awhile to copy. And then pick out the pieces clips you want to be in your movie. A SSD will work better for this. You then share to wherever you want.

 

[Dave Braine]

If that is possible (and I hope I'm explaining what I want to do properly) please post step-by-step instructions on how to set that up

There are two ways to do this:
1. Simply drag and drop your existing iMovie Library file to an external drive. Give it a different name. I named mine iMovie Library External. This is because you can access multiple Libraries at the same time with iMovie.

2. If you just want a Library file on the external drive for future use, open iMovie and then go iMovie>File Menu>Open Library>New, navigate to the external drive, give it a name(see above) and Save.

When you subsequently want to import into iMovie, just choose the external drive. To open and view that Library in iMovie go File Menu>Open Library and choose the one that you want to use.