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I'm shooting a bunch of P2 HD next week, and will have to do some long take capturing directly to a MBP, feeding an external drive.
My client needs the files delivered on a PC formatted drive for an Avid system.
Can I format say a 750GB drive as FAT32 into 6x125 partitions on my Mac, thus making it cross compatible? I've heard FAT32 can do this, but I've read some conflicting reports.
What about a workflow where I just capture all this footage on a mac drive as normal, then get it onto another PC formatted drive after the shoot?
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> What about a workflow where I just capture all this footage on a mac drive as normal,
> then get it onto another PC formatted drive after the shoot?
That's the way I'd do it.
As for your multiple partition-scheme, I haven't done it, myself, on multiple partitions the way that you're planning, but from my own experience I think that it should work. It seems needlessly complicated, though.
A few other thoughts...
Are you familiar with the ways of making FAT 32 volumes from a Mac?
You know to keep well under the 4GB file-size limit on a FAT 32 volume?
My cross-platform headaches usually come from missing codecs and editors who don't know how to deal with files that look unfamiliar. Have you confirmed that your codec choices will be acceptable for the Avid editor (preferably by speaking to the editor, himself)?
You might want to do the client a courtesy and get rid of .DS_Store files and resource files before handing over the drive(s).
I can think of a few things that could get messed up when/after you hand off the stuff to the client. I don't suppose that you could just try a sample before committing to it, huh? Either way, keep a complete backup for yourself.
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> .. how would I do that though? I have access to plenty of drives and PCs at my job to assist.
If you've got a PC with Gig-E, that would save you a hassle.
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[quote MacMagus]> .. how would I do that though? I have access to plenty of drives and PCs at my job to assist.
If you've got a PC with Gig-E, that would save you a hassle.
I have been away from high end networking for a couple of years. There used to be problems with transferring files over 4 GB over networks between Mac and PC. Has it been solved?
The 32 GB partition size limit in WinXP is an arbitrary limit designed to push people to use NTFS. There are third party PC utilities that can format FAT32 drives up to 2 TB partition sizes (but with very large sector sizes that waste a lot space when storing small files). I have not tried any in a while because I need to make files larger than 4 GB for backups, but it used to be you could download them from every drive manufacturers web sites.
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> There used to be problems with transferring files over 4 GB over networks
> between Mac and PC. Has it been solved?
I'm not sure what you're referring to. There have been a lot of issues with large file transfers with Windows PC's, some relating to the file system, others relating to device drivers and caching problems, still others relating to flaws in Active Directory and most recently to bugs in Vista's drivers.
But that's what you get for dealing with Windows at all.
XP has no such notorious limitation that I'm aware of.
Vista does have a pervasive problem with slow or stalling transfers of large files... but then, networking speeds in Vista seem to run about 20% what they were in XP on average, so I wouldn't want to transfer large files to a Vista PC if I could avoid it... but it probably wouldn't be too bad if I could leave the copy going over night.
I suppose that I should have mentioned that it would probably go better if the PC is running XP SP2.
