Hard drive to FCP Or Avid

Mark Smith

Veteran
I shoot with my HVX and deliver to a variety of clients, some cut on Avids running on PC's and some cut on FCP. Recently I had an Issue handing off a drive to a client that was bringing the files into a PC based Avid. Some struggles ensued and in they end they got all the files to work. I am a Mac based operation so here's the question: If I format hard drives with the unix option using Disk utility, will that drive be readable with a PC and a Mac?

I recently purchased a 70 GB Rev drive set up and the discs come formatted as UFD. As an experiment I used P2 Genie to copy 3 P2 cards to a Rev Drive. I could see and read the files with my Mac. I then walked the drive over to a friend with a PC, plugged it in and all the Files and folders showed up there as well with out any fuss.

This would seem ideal in a certain sense as a Rev Disc could be handed to a client without concern if they were going to a Mac based or PC based edit sytem...
 
FYI a rev 70 gig drive actually holds about 65 GB which makes it nice because you can back up a full P2 store to one cartridge. 70 gig cartirdges are availble for around $220 for a box of 4.

But back to the original question: If I format a hard drive with the unix option in disc utility, will that give a disc that can be read cross platform like a rev drive?

I don't have a spare drive to try it on at the moment.
 
what is a rev drive and can you give a link of the manufacturer?


Mark Smith said:
FYI a rev 70 gig drive actually holds about 65 GB which makes it nice because you can back up a full P2 store to one cartridge. 70 gig cartirdges are availble for around $220 for a box of 4.

But back to the original question: If I format a hard drive with the unix option in disc utility, will that give a disc that can be read cross platform like a rev drive?

I don't have a spare drive to try it on at the moment.
 
The REV drive is an Iomega product (Argh!), but Grass Valley/Canopus resells it under their own brand as well. That would make me sleep a little bit easier at night.

REV Pro Information
 
FYi Iomega no doubt is aware of their poor reputation with zip drives. I think they did their homework with the Rev product. Don't know if you follow the discussion over at CML... but the new grass valley camera, the infinity, records to a rev drive. At NAB this year some folks at the CML camera shoot out recorded some video with an infinity to a rev disc, took the disc out of the camera and dropped in a glass of beer. They then took the disc out, got the beer out of it some how and used it to play back what they had originally recorded without any issues. Sounds decent to me, though I have had mini dv tapes go through the wash and sort of play back afterwards. However they only sort of played back *once*.
 
By the way, use FAT32 if you want a drive that will work with both a Mac and a PC.
THe MAC will consider the drive a TRANSFER ONLY drive. You can copy from it but you can't write something onto it.
 
There must be a solution to this drive formatting issue. I have an Archos AV480 media player with a 80 gig drive. I can plug this unit into either a mac or PC and write and read files to its drive.
If I format fat 32 how do I write files to it in the first place since I am using a Mac to write the P2 volumes to the drive in the first place?
 
It's NTFS what Mac OS X only reads. FAT32 it reads and write, but have the 4Gb limit. You can't have the cake and eat it too!!!
I don't understand why Mac OS X don't write to NTFS!!!!!!
 
videoteque73 said:
I don't understand why Mac OS X don't write to NTFS!!!!!!

Maybe because it's a Windows proprietory format and Apple has their own HFS+?

Windows still runs on a DOS based core and Apple is UNIX?

I don't know, why?
 
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