PC & Mac compatibility with external hard drives.

[spikeman256]

I’m a PC guy and I’m the one with the new HVX-200…my friend who is the video editing expert is a Mac guy and he is a pro at Final Cut Pro. So, I have some decisions to make…

I’m trying to hold out for a Cineporter, so I don’t want to buy a firestore…as a result, I have no way to record longer than the 8 minutes on a P2…I am considering purchasing DVRACK HD 2.0 to get around this, but it only works with Windows.

Can I plug a Glyph 062 hard drive (500GB, Firewire 800, RAID0, 75MB/sec) into my PC desktop or PC laptop with DVRACK software to give myself up to 500 minutes of storage, and then later share the drive back and forth with my Mac friend?
- I’ve heard a few issues about having to format the drive as a Mac drive and then using the software “Mac Drive” on my PC so that I can mount the drive…if I were to do this, would DVRACK software in Windows still be able to access it?

1 – Can the HVX-200 record right to a Mac with Final Cut Pro (as you can with DVRACK on a PC)? If not, is there other software that would allow you to do this with a Mac?

2 – If a Mac desktop or a newer Mac laptop doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot, how are Mac users transferring footage from their HVX-200?

3 – Are there any concerns/recommendations about ESATA vs. Firewire 800 with an external drive?
- Is either better than the other in regards to switching between a PC & a Mac?

4 – FYI for those who care: Both G-tech & Glyph recommend RAID-0 for HD video since it’s so much faster. Their Quad-interface drives (esata, usb, and fw) are only single drives…ie, no RAID, ie, much slower. The reason for this is because of the chipset that they use can only handle two esata ports…one for the drive in the case and one on the outside for you to plug into, or they can put both ports inside the case for two drives as a RAID-0..but by doing that, there would be no port available for a third esata port for the user to plug into.

Thanks for any help.

-shannon

 

[Barry_Green]

Can I plug a Glyph 062 hard drive (500GB, Firewire 800, RAID0, 75MB/sec) into my PC desktop or PC laptop with DVRACK software to give myself up to 500 minutes of storage, and then later share the drive back and forth with my Mac friend?

Yes, if the drive is formatted FAT32.

I’ve heard a few issues about having to format the drive as a Mac drive and then using the software “Mac Drive” on my PC so that I can mount the drive…if I were to do this, would DVRACK software in Windows still be able to access it?

That's another option; from what I understand it does work, but I haven't tried it. I use the FAT32 method instead.

If a Mac desktop or a newer Mac laptop doesn’t have a PCMCIA slot, how are Mac users transferring footage from their HVX-200?

Either through the camera, or a P2 Store using it as a pass-thru slot, or via a PCD20 slot reader, or the upcoming expresscard->PCMCIA adapter.

 

[THoff]

You don't need to use FAT32. It's only needed if both a PC and a Mac will be used to write to the drive, and you don't want to use a third-party driver to give you write access.

FAT32 is the lowest common denominator, both PCs and Macs can write to it (even the HVX200 can dump P2 cards to it directly).

If you format the drive as NTFS, you don't have to deal with a bunch of 4GB file segments that can be a pain to deal with while editing. However, the Mac can only read NTFS, but not write.

MacDrive will let a PC write to an HFS-formatted drive. This would allow large (>4GB) video files and read/write access on the PC and Mac, but it's an extra expense.

DV Rack is great and I highly recommend it, but you can also use FCP for live captures. You don't get all of the monitoring and quality-control tools of DV Rack, though.

 

[spikeman256]

Thanks Barry & Thoff...regarding to Barry's note on FAT32...yes, both the PC and the Mac would potentially be writing to it (I'm not the editor, but I'd like to be able to learn the process with my own PC).

Also, I've read enough good things about DVRACK to assume that some people probably capture with it on a Windows box, even if they are going to do the editing on a Mac...

Do some people do this?

 

[Dick Campbell]

Also, I've read enough good things about DVRACK to assume that some people probably capture with it on a Windows box, even if they are going to do the editing on a Mac...

Do some people do this?

me . I edit with FCP on a Mac Pro, but my laptop is a XP Dell with DV Rack. I use a 260Gb external USB drive to xfr files to the Mac (it's NTFS).

 

[THoff]

There are quite a few people who are running DV Rack under Bootcamp on a Mac laptop, and then edit using FCP.

 

[spikeman256]

THoff, are there any speed/performance concerns in regards to a Mac reading NTFS (since it can't write), read/write share of FAT32, and using Mac Drive to read/write the Mac volume?

I know NTFS is better in general, but does it have any impact on editing?

 

[THoff]

FAT32 is the lowest common denominator, and its sole benefit is that PCs, Macs, and the camera understand it.

Other than that, it's not all that great. It isn't as robust or efficient as NTFS and HFS, and it limits the size of any individual files to 4GB -- depending on your recording mode, that may be as little as four minutes of video.

If you record to a P2 card or a DTE solution, it's no big deal because the major NLEs understand MXF files now and treat all the 4GB file segments as one clip, but if you use DV Rack (or any other program) to record directly to disk on a FAT32 volume, then you wind up with a bunch of small files that must be dropped into your timeline/sequence individually and in the right order.

Therefore, if you are going to record using DV Rack or some other software, I would strongly advise you use either NTFS or HFS. If both the PC and Mac need to write to the volume, HFS with MacDrive on the PC would probably be the way to go. If you don't need write access on the Mac, the using NTFS would work and not require any additional third-party software like MacDrive.

I don't use a Mac, but I can't imagine that the driver would be a performance bottleneck when accessing a NTFS volume.

One thing to keep in mind is that FCP wants to re-wrap everything in a QuickTime container if it isn't already in that format, and I've seen reports saying that even the QuickTime files from DV Rack elicit some sort of "this file isn't optimized for QuickTime, do you want to fix that" message in FCP. If that's the case, then you could use a read-only NTFS volume as the source and let FCP re-wrap/re-write the file on a native HFS volume.