Formatting Fat32 on the Mac...

Jim Arthurs

Jim Arthurs

Well-known member
Hi all, I'm helping a guy remotely put one of those MWAVE "magic box" USB2.0 On The Go portable drives together so he can backup his P2 in the field, and I had a general OS10/Mac question...

The drive needs to be formatted as Fat32... will this be doable from his G4 laptop? Does the Mac OS allow you to format an external drive as Fat32?

Sorry, I lack the depth of knowledge on the Mac that I need to answer this.. :(

Also, in FCP, can you edit 1080i HDV and P2 1080i on the same timeline?

Thanks in advance,

Jim Arthurs
 
Yes, you can format an external drive as FAT32 with the Disk Utility application. Apple calls it MS DOS FILE SYSYEM.
Yes, you can edit HDV and DVCPRO HD on the same timeline, but HDV will need to render, as you should edit in an DVCPRO HD timeline.
Might be a good idea to batch convert the HDV material to DVCPRO HD before you start editing....
 
Thank you Anders! I very much appreciate the help. I'm going to join the world of Apple soon with a MacBook Pro, but for now I feel very much out of my element.

Is there the 32gig limitation when formatting? On the PC I've used a freeware utility to format larger drives to full capacity.

I will also recommend that he get P2Genie for his system... :)

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
The 32 GB is a limitation on Win XP only as a measure to get people to use the NTFS file system. FAT-32 partitions can be up to 4 TB in theory.....Some implementations limit partitions to 125GB as this is the limit for Microsoft's Scandisk utility, when working on FAT-32 Partitions. I believe Disk Utility can format up to the 4 TB limit...havent tried though, only did a 500GB once...
 
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FAT 32 again

FAT 32 again

Forgive me if this has been answered somewhere else before, it's a basic question, but is FAT32 the best format to use for ext. hard drives dedicated to P2 media for MAC and why? I've heard that NTFS was more "stable", which I assumed meant against lose of media. The Fantom drive I purchased encourages formatting NFS + to MAC only users
So now I am very confused.
 
You can't write to NTFS from Mac OS, but you can read from the NTFS drives just fine.

FAT32 is read/write on both OS, with the 4gig single file size limitation to keep in mind.

Finally, you can read and write to Mac formatted drives from a PC with MacDrive software installed.

I think that covers all the bases... :)
 
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