Using a PC/Windows Hard drive with FCP

T

telebay

Well-known member
Hi... I'm new to this, so any help is appreciated.

What I am planning to do is capture video direct to my laptop's external hard drive via a program like DV Rack (of course, my laptop is a Windows PC). I will be utilizing Serious Magic's yet-to-be-released DVC-RACK (for the HVX200). Probably doesn't matter to you at this point, but let's say I shoot 720 24pn mode.

I then want to take that external hard drive and plug it into my Mac to edit footage in FCP.

What needs to be looked out for... any hard-drive purchase recommendations? What about the formatting of the hard-drive? What about the file types for the footage? What needs to be done in FCP to import this without issues? Etc. Any thoughts would be very helpful!
 
Hard drive has to be formatted FAT32 to be recognized by both systems.

I believe DVC Rack will allow saving files in Quicktime format, which would hopefully make it be directly importable into FCP. Remains to be seen though.
 
Hi I worked for a company that had both a suit of Macs and PCs and we had to always convert the avi's to qt before we moved it to the mac or on the mac after moving it over. At the time the mac would not read any pc formated drive properly. It would either not see it at all or was totaly unreliable. Mabye 10.3 or .4 and fcp 5.0 is different and can see it, good luck.
 
Thanks!

1) If I format the drive as a FAT32, isn't there a 4gb limit for files?
2) I found this software called MacDrive 6 ... apparently it would allow you to take an Apple formatted hard-drive and use it with a Windows PC. My thinking: Drop the Quicktime files from my Windows PC to this hard-drive (utilizing MacDrive 6) and then later plug-in this hard-drive to my Mac. Should work, right?
3) Or, are you saying that this isn't necessary as long as the files are in Quicktime format?
 
That shouldn't be necessary, we transfered the files with a gigabit ethernet card to the mac. that worked fine. We just couldn't share the drives between the computers nomatter how they were formatted. Gigabit is pretty fast if your computers are close enough to run ethernet.
 
Telebay,

I'm doing what you want to do with DV Rack, and had a lot of help from the Serious Magic folks to get it right. Here's what I've learned:

1. An external USB 2.0 drive WILL work fine with DVR and its speed is not an issue. I use a Lacie Mobile Hard Drive. The advantage vs 4-pin Firewire is that it's powered by the laptop, making it the only solution that doesn't need a electric outlet. However, you need to turn off all the energy saving features in your laptop, set the screen to max brightness, etc....so battery life isn't great. (But the USB drive is not a big drain itself.)

2. Both NTSC and Fat32 can be read by Windows XP and Mac, but Mac can only write to Fat32 and DVR wants to write to NTSC. You get errors in DVR with Fat32.

This doesn't really matter if you're just recording to the laptop and transferring the clips to Mac for editing, but you can't use the same drive to export a movie and load it back on the laptop.

I sometimes just use the laptop's internal drive for recording the clips. It works without any problems.

3. You can set DVR to record QuickTime clips, so there's nothing to do in FCP but import the files directly and work on them. Very simple.

4. A lot of people bash Lacie, but that's probably because the drives are everywhere. Read message boards and you probably won't see comments from the many people who haven't had problems. That said, I've heard good things about the drives sold directly by otherworldcomputing.com

5. Serious Magic is great about tech support, and they have a message board for visitors. You might want to sign up and ask questions there.

6. Disclaimer: I'm not shooting HD, just SD with a DVX100a.
 
Thanks guys... you've been very helpful. In case it adds anything noteworthy to this discussion, I'll also include what I heard back from Serious Magic regarding this topic:

* Regarding MacDrive, they said:
"Most of our Mac editors use MacDrive on the laptop running DV Rack, and format their drives for the Mac (called HFS+ formatting.) With MacDrive installed, Windows sees HFS+ formatted drives, and all applications can read/write to them with very little performance penalty. DV Rack should work fine with MacDrive installed."

* Regarding Fat32, they said:
"If you are using FAT32-formatted drives, then DV Rack will stop recording at about the 18-minute marker. This is because of the 4GB-per-file limit. NTFS formatting doesn't have a file size limit, but NTFS drives are read-only in OS X. That may work, but you need to be aware of that limit. With a FAT32 partition, a DVCProHD clip will hit the wall at about the 4 and a half minute marker. There's nothing on the feature list now to detect and accomodate for that, but I will bring it up to the programmers.
As with DV, you'll be able to hit record again while recording, and DV Rack will finish the current clip and start a new file that is contiguous with the previous file - no missing frames between files. This is a manual way of recording continuously"

* Regarding upcoming release for HVX:
"The DVCProHD support will be a $195 add-on to the existing DV Rack software. It adds support for both DVCProHD and DVCPro50. We don't have a target date for the release of the DVCPro add-on yet. It should be ready sometime this summer. There is a beta program ongoing."

* And Mediafour, maker of MacDrive 6 said the following:

"Yes, our MacDrive product would enable you to do this. The drive would need to be zeroed and reformatted in HFS or HFS+ so that you can use it on your Mac, and on your PC with MacDrive installed.

"A free Windows utility for zeroing (i.e. wiping) a drive is available at the following link: http://www.download.com/Active-Kill-Disk-Hard-Drive-Eraser/3000-2092_4-10188745.html?tag=lst-0-1

"You can then use MacDrive 6 to make it a Mac disk with Mac partitions (Start -> All Programs -> MacDrive 6 -> Tools -> Create or Change Mac Hard Disks)."
 
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