SO if we purchase formatted drives I should reformat FAT32 on the PC - load footage - and then the mac will be able to read it - do I have this correct?
Most external drives come formatted Fat32 and will work fine with a mac. If you reformat the drive on a PC it will have to be NTFS and will still work when connected to a mac but you can only read off of it and can not write to it.
Also, once you have a new drive and want to reformat it...don't. In XP you can not format a drive or partition larger that 32 gig unless you go through a lengthy command line process that I can not remember how to do at the moment.
I think most pc formatted drives come NTFS - also you can format any size drive in win xp - I do it all the time - Or do you mean you can format larger then 32 if you do FAT32?