I'm new to video, and I'm trying to capture my video to a external hard drive instead of my laptop hard drive, could someone please tell me what settings to use in Vegas Movie Studio 8 to do this
On the capture windows there's usually an option to direct the application where to capture. Look around, you will find it, can't give you more info since I don't know which one of the 3 ways on Vegas you are using to capture footage.
If you have space on your internal drive, capture to it instead to avoid disk i/o bottlenecks and possibly dropped frames. After you're done, offload the captured video to your external drive.