can I do this???

A

Adrianb1983

Member
Hi everyone. I'd like to know if it is compatible to use a PC laptop to offload the P2 cards to a external HD and then connect the HD to a mac, copy the files and edit. Will this work? Or the mac for some reason wont be able to recognize the files that I offloaded to the PC?

:dankk2:
 
Files are files, and unless they're propriatary (and if the HDD file systems match up--they almost certainly will), you shouldn't run into any problems.
One question, however: are you running an Intel or PowerPC Mac?
 
It is kind of a serious issue because Macs and PCs don't share the same file formats. On the Mac there's HFS+ and Mac OS Extended- which cannot be read on the PC. On the PC there's FAT-32 which can be read on Mac but has a 4GB file size limit and then NTFS which has unlimited size but cannot be written to by Mac without a plugin. My suggestion if you're going Mac <>PC is either do the transfer over a network in which case it doesn't matter. Or get the following plugin which enables full read/write access to NTFS volumes on a Mac:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

-Noah
 
Adrianb1983 said:
Hi everyone. I'd like to know if it is compatible to use a PC laptop to offload the P2 cards to a external HD and then connect the HD to a mac, copy the files and edit. Will this work? Or the mac for some reason wont be able to recognize the files that I offloaded to the PC?

:dankk2:
Click to expand...

I did exactly that when I had my Mac system. No problems at all.

I built all my external HDs and had them formatted FAT32 to enable just this cross platform compatabilty.
 
Shooter said:
I did exactly that when I had my Mac system. No problems at all.

I built all my external HDs and had them formatted FAT32 to enable just this cross platform compatabilty.
Click to expand...

Sure that's a way to go but when you're working with large projects it's quite conceivable to go over 4GB per file and then Fat-32 will no longer serve your purpose.

Noah
 
There's also MacDrive on Windows which lets you read/write to a Mac HDD.

A FAT32 drive would always be fine for offloading cards and transporting them between systems, because the cards are formatted as FAT32. It's only if you create larger files yourself that you might run into the 4GB file limit. (Which might also be the case if you use P2 Viewer or P2CMS to stitch spanned clips.)
 
David has a good solution and it's MacDrive for Windows.

I notice that it doesn't work with some SATA controllers for external drives however.
 
Ok. Thank you all for your answers. I asked this because I'll be renting the hvx and a PC laptop to offload the P2 cards (first time I rent my camera) to a guy who's going to edit in his macpro and I want to make sure that he wont have any problems. So, tell me if I got all the possible solutions right:

1. if I have the PC HD formatted as FAT32 and the external HD also formatted as FAT32 I wont have any problems to transfer the data to a mac later on, right?

2. In case I have the PC formatted as NTFS I need macdrive for windows.

One last thing, this guy I'll be renting the camera to is going to bring his own external HD which I'm pretty sure he uses with his mac, so will this HD work when I connect it to my PC? Consider the fact that I'm pretty sure my laptop is formatted as NTFS because I've had files larger than 4 GB in it.

wow, I know so very little about computers! :(
 
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