Swappable Xternal FW Hard Drives..

D

DVX100Shooter

Veteran
Last year when I was about to buy my G5/FCP system. The salesman was telling me that I could work on a project then save it to my external FW drive then take drive to someone elses house or studio and plug that drive into their system and they could pull my project up and add to or enhance what I did. Now to do this, the other person would have to have FCP right? Now what if I edit something on FCP, saved the project on the external then take it to someone that is a pro with say After Effects. Would they be able to import my project from my external drive into whatever system they are using via the FW port? Also do they have to download my CDrom for the external for their computer to read my drive?

I don't need to do any of the above right now. I was told it can be done and was just seeing if it actually could if I needed to someday.
 
Re: Swappable Xternal FW Hard Drives..

FW Drives are plug and play. They'll work on any system... BUT - as a mac user you should have formatted the drive to extended MAC version thingie. That will cause some problems if your friend has a pc. But any mac will read it fine. No need for software.

If you save your movie as a QT Movie (not compression, and NOT self-contained) directly from FCP AE will be able to read it. If you save it as a project file you'll need FCP on the other system AND you'll need all your media too.

Hope that helps a bit.

CaptM
 
Re: Swappable Xternal FW Hard Drives..

[quote author=DVX100Shooter link=board=FCP;num=1089726712;start=0#0 date=07/13/04 at 06:51:52]Last year when I was about to buy my G5/FCP system. The salesman was telling me that I could work on a project then save it to my external FW drive then take drive to someone elses house or studio and plug that drive into their system and they could pull my project up and add to or enhance what I did. Now to do this, the other person would have to have FCP right? Now what if I edit something on FCP, saved the project on the external then take it to someone that is a pro with say After Effects. Would they be able to import my project from my external drive into whatever system they are using via the FW port? Also do they have to download my CDrom for the external for their computer to read my drive?

I don't need to do any of the above right now. I was told it can be done and was just seeing if it actually could if I needed to someday.[/quote]

Yes you can, in several ways, depending on how you set up your work through. You can also edit on FCP and take tapes and source materials to an older on-line suite that can handle EDL for tape post.

Macs can read nearly any FW hard drive made, so if you go Mac to Mac, you are in clover. Going to a PC is harder, but possible. Make sure your drive is FAT32, make sure you carry the driver disk, and you may want to pretest your idea. Also, PCs will fail to mount FW disks when its identical sister machine next to it will automount, and the next one over needed to go through manual mounting in the find hardware. Preparing for a class, about four IT persons and myself went mystified from computer to computer which were "identical" to find out they were not. Although from the same Dell order, they several different XP builds on them, different hard drives, different processors in several cases, and apparently different firewire cards, even though they had nearly consecutive serials. I can imagine an assembly like where some guy grabs a firewire card from a bin and throws it into the computer, then grabs another and does the same, never knowing the two are not identical and do not handles firewire the same.

The next version of Windows though promises to have bottom level support for FireWire, so this will no longer be an issue, as everyone will have to "whistle the same tune".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top