External drive. Mac or PC format ?

Mathew Knight

Mathew Knight

Active member
Hi all. I have a pretty good system going with shooting DVCPRO-HD. Putting P2 cards in a PC laptop, transferring to an external hardrive. Then taking the harddrive to a Mac editing system and copy them to the edit suite drive to use in final cut.

The external drive I am testing with at the moment is a lacie 40GB brick (USB 2.0)
So far I have just put it straight into the PC and transfer speeds have been excellent. And the mac recognizes the drive fine. But copying to the macs internal drive is very slow.

Would I get better transfer speeds if I formatted my external drive as a mac. Then used the 'macdrive' software on my PC to recognize the drive ?

Is this going to affect transfer speeds ?

If I use the drive formatted for the PC am I going to run into this 'FAT32' 4GB limit stuff (which I am not familar with) ?

I am a cameraman not an editor. But thanks to Panasonic I have to get the on-set to edit suite workflow sorted. All this computer stuff is quite the learning curve.
 
Anders Holck said:
USB2 drives are underperforming on the Mac, you really should use a firewire drive.
Click to expand...
So the format thing doesn't matter much ? Its just USB2.0 Vs Firewire drive.
But USB2.0 is O.K (transfer spped wise) on the PC, but very slow on the mac. Is that correct ?
 
So what format is the drive formatted as right now? NTFS?

A usb2 drive would feel a bit slower but not slow as h...
 
The Mac cannot write to NTFS volumes, it will only have read-only access.

NTFS isn't supported by the camera for dumping P2 card contents, that requires FAT32 as well.
 
Anders Holck said:
So what format is the drive formatted as right now? NTFS?

A usb2 drive would feel a bit slower but not slow as h...
Click to expand...
I just plugged the USB2.0 external drive straight into the laptop. And I was away. No drivers needed. And I didn't manually format it. I prersumed it just made it a PC format (like FAT32) ? But I have no understanding of this area. (as you can probably tell)
 
THoff said:
The Mac cannot write to NTFS volumes, it will only have read-only access.

NTFS isn't supported by the camera for dumping P2 card contents, that requires FAT32 as well.
Click to expand...

He said he is using a windows Laptop to offload the cards, not the camera.

He also said he copied off the HD on the mac, which is also possible with a NTFS partition.

So it would be possible to everything he said even if the drive was NTFS formatted:-)
 
What type of Mac are you using to copy from the HD? (Are you sure it's USB2?)
And is it connected directly to the MAC? Most Keyboard and monitor hubs are USB 1.
 
Anders Holck said:
What type of Mac are you using to copy from the HD? (Are you sure it's USB2?)
And is it connected directly to the MAC? Most Keyboard and monitor hubs are USB 1.
Click to expand...
Its little mac at home. Just testing the transfer. The hard disk is USB2.0 (a Lacie 40GB brick). It plugs straight into the side of an eMac.

When I take it to the edit suit that mac is a G5 with all the bells.
 
I have to disagree the USB2 drives underperform on a Mac.

I think they underperform for sustained throughput on both Mac and PC.
 
Your workflow looks good, no changes needed. Although I'd go for a FW dirve over USB. I haven't touched a USB drive in years.
 
BenB said:
Your workflow looks good, no changes needed. Although I'd go for a FW dirve over USB. I haven't touched a USB drive in years.
Click to expand...
I think we will be using a firewire drive. The USB2.0 was just something i grabbed for the test.
One more question. Do most new PC laptops have a place to plug a firewire drive ?
Do they call it firewire on a PC or does it have a different name ?

PS. All my workflow is pretty much sorted and working well. Now I am just looking at speeding a few things up a bit. We are going to use a much faster laptop (the CPU & ram needs to be big/fast/good) and hopefully we can plug a firewire drive into that laptop.

I had a look at greenscreen tests today (shot 1080/25p) and they are fantastic.
 
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