Help with backing up AVCHD.

H

Hot Dish

New member
OK, I have an iMac, OSX Snow Leopard, and Final Cut Studio 3.
I have a Canon 5D Mii, and the 7D. I recently purchased a camera
for family use. The Sony HDR-XR550V. Now I have no problem
logging the AVCHD files using FCP7.

The problem I am having is that, as we all know these files are huge!
So I want to transfer them to an external hard drive after they
are in my mac. When I go to drag them into any one of my 3 external's
it won't let me. It gives me an error message. Has anyone had this
problem before?

Is there a certain external hard drive I can get to back up these files?
Or is it something I am doing wrong?

After they are logged in my Mac, I take the capture scratch and try to
transfer it. This works fine on all the capture scratch from my Canon's.

Help?
 
What error message are you getting? That's a pretty important piece of information.

What external hard drives are you using? How big are the drives? Are the formatted FAT32 or MacOS extended?

Are they Firewire or USB2?
 
id bet you probably bought these drives at a best buy or office depot kind of place and they came formatted FAT32 which has a 4 gig file size limit.

reformat the external (which will erase the content currently on it) as mac os extended non-journaled and all will be well
 
You definitely want to do a DATA TRANSFER before the log and transfer so you have backed up the original and not the larger transfered footage. Since your codec is probably 25mb/sec or less you might set FCP to PRORES LT and then skip what I just said. Then you'd back up the transfered footage. I have a client whose FCP system magically changes to 4:4:4 uncompressed for no reason what so ever. Not helpful. Huge files...
 
wgzn said:
id bet you probably bought these drives at a best buy or office depot kind of place and they came formatted FAT32 which has a 4 gig file size limit.

reformat the external (which will erase the content currently on it) as mac os extended non-journaled and all will be well
Click to expand...

sounds like the right advice.
 
Thanks. I am buying a new external HD since I don't have anywhere to back these up. But I will use this information when doing so.
 
Data Robotics Drobo
G-Technology G-Drive
Lacie d2 Quadra
Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition

They all support Firewire 800 and Mac Journaled formatting. I personally have 3 Western Digital drives which I'm very pleased with, though they can be a little noisy under heavy read/write (as can most of the others, truth be told).
 
Look at macsalec.com.

Good company.

In my view, any Drobo, MyBook, YourBook, or HisBook is not best solution for storing critical data. If you can buy it at Walmart, I wouldn't use it to back up data.

A lot of reported issues with Lacies as well.

Just my opinion.
 
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