Want to use a PC to dump P2 footage and edit on Mac

S

StingrayPictures

Member
I've gone through the threads to find something similar, no luck...

I'm going to do some shooting with an HVX in another country. I edit on a Mac but do not own a laptop, so will not be bringing one. A friend of mine lives there and has offered for me to use his PC while I am there to dump my footage (I was going to bring an external hard drive with me.)

Basically, any potential problems here? I thought I could copy the entire disc image of the P2 cards by doing a "drag and drop" and then when I get back, hook up the hard drive to my Mac and start importing through FCP as usual. Does this make sense? Am I totally out to lunch here? I was looking at both the Maxtor and WesternDigital terrabyte RAID drives for doing this. I know how to format a drive for my Mac, just not familiar with using a drive for both Mac and PC and what format it needs to be (Fat32?). What's the best way to format the drive so it will work for this bizarre plan I have? To sum it up, I have the HVX200, the P2 cards and harddrive, want to dump footage to the drive through PC for later editing on Mac....
 
Thanks for the link, I checked it out, makes sense...

Has anyone here tried this? It seems pretty straight forward, any testimonials would be great!
 
Been using it for a while myself- they have a free demo too so you can try it out.

Noah
 
remember if you can dump the footage from a the pc drive to another mac drive you have you dont need the software, mac will nativly read NTFS just not write to it, so ingest on your pc to the NTFS drive. Then plug into mac and transfer it to your mac drive :)
 
Most external hard disks that you buy off the shelf nowadays come pre-formatted FAT32, and that'll work on both Mac and Windows systems. So with just about any hard disk you buy at the store, you should be able to plug it into the Windows box, offload cards to it, unplug it and then go plug it in the Mac and edit footage from it.
 
I have used an external NTFS drive to load cards to in the field from my PC and then have plugged that external into my G5 and FCP. The MAC can only read the files. From their I log and transfer the clips in FCP which wraps them as QT files to my edit drive which is MAC OS. I then can wipe the field drive and use it again in the field. I do make DVD backups of all cards! To qualify this....I have used this workflow for about 100 8BG cards and have had NO issues.

My 2 cents.
 
All very good info...I had guessed Fat32...VINCE, how do you fit an 8 GB card on a DVD? Or do you just mean you're backing everything up to disc in general? Also, when you are bringing in the files, you are importing them as P2 files, correct? And are they still optimized for FCP (the QT/FCP hybrid icon) or are they just QT (blue). The reason I ask is that once I used a Firestore with the older upgrade, and I HATED using the regular QT files in FCP, the optimized QuickTimes just seemed so much better.

Maybe this is a 'Part 3' to the question. Since P2 cards break up video clips (yes, I know about spanning, etc), what happens when you dump from a P2 card to a drive, then import the P2 later with FCP when the drive is hooked to a Mac. Does it still recognize the separate clips as parts to a whole or do you have to manually figure out how the clips fit together?
 
I have been using dual layer DVD's and back them up as a data disc in Roxio. Yes, I am importing them as P2 files and they are the blue QT .mov files. Since this is the only way I have done it, I quess I don't know what I am missing! I have not had issues with the QT files, but can you please tell me the added benefits of the hybrid file!
My spanned files have linked automatically. I have not paid much attention, but it seems like it puts the complete clip on both cards when in FCP, but again- I have not really confirmed this, just noticed sometimes I have the same clip in 2 sequential folders (cards).
Hope this helps and I look forward to hearing about the hybrid files!
Thanks.
 
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