Question about External Hard Drive...

T

thejessicastar1

Active member
I have a short film I edited on a Mac using Final Cut Pro HD as a student that is on my Mac at home. I'm now running Vegas on my PC (the Final Cut program was on my school's computers) and want to re-edit the short film. The problem I'm running into is that after I dumped the Final Cut files and the .mov raw files onto my Mac's hard drive at home, I reformatted the external hard drive for a PC. When I plug the hard drive into the Mac now, it shows up, but it won't let me transfer anything to it (which makes sense since it's formatted for a PC now). What I want to do is import those .mov files into Vegas and re-edit them, but I can't get the files off of my Mac and onto an external hard drive that will be used with a PC. I need to buy a new external hard drive anyway, but even still, won't I be in the same situation? If I format it for a Mac in order to transfer the files, I won't be able to use it on the PC. If I format it for a PC, I won't be able to get the files off. To top it all off, my CD burner in the Mac is broken. The only thing I can think of is to use a 1gb flash drive to take each .mov file individually, but then what happens when I run into a file bigger than 1gb? I'm stuck again.

Any suggestions?

Nathan
 
Use FCP to transfer the DV files to tape. Recapture. You don't want to be editing .mov files anyway; .avi is far less clunky.

However, my understanding -- and I may be wrong in this -- is that Macs can use the FAT32 file system that's common on older Windows versions.

The problem THERE is that you can't have a file larger than 4GB. But if you can format the external as FAT32 and get the files off the Mac, you should be OK.

Then you'd probably want to transfer the files off the external and reformat as NTFS.
 
In order to use a harddrive on both a PC and MAC it needs to be formatted to FAT32, which can be done on your PC. Once this is done, you can transfer files back and forth between the two OS's.
 
Ok

Ok

All right, I see. I do still have the original DV tapes that I can just recapture from if it makes that much of a difference between .mov and .avi. I guess the only advantage of using the .mov files is that I had done an advanced capture and chosen particular takes as opposed to just capturing the whole tape. I'll probably just end up recapturing. It'll be less hassle. Plus, I don't anticipate needing to use the External with the Mac in the future, so I'll just leave it at that. I just looked and it's only two tapes worth of footage, so that shouldn't be that hard to comb back through and find the right takes.

Thanks for your help.

Nathan
 
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