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Regarding Avid, and External Hard drives for both Mac and PC
Good afternoon everyone,
I have a quick question regarding a bit of a situation my class and I are faced with right now.
In two weeks, we leave for Portugal to film a short documentary. We are going to be shooting on cards, and we planned on logging our footage every night, and saving them on external hard drives. Now the problem we have is that some users are on Macs, while others are on PCs (it’s actually about half/half). As a result, we need to bring one hard drive for Macs, and one for PCs.
The issues I realized was getting the footage from the Mac hard drive back onto a PC when we return to edit on Avid Media Composer 5. Since it’s on a PC, the Mac hard drive won’t read, and if we format the Mac hard drive to Fat32, so that it will read on both Mac and PC, we will be faced with a 4 gig-per-file limit (as I’m told by another classmate)
Can anyone offer some advice to help fix this issue?
Thanks so much.
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5 Replies
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You can install a program called NTFS-3G for Mac computers (there are others around as well) that allows them to read and write to NTFS (Windows) drives.
My suggestion would be to log onto whatever drives you can and use a Mac computer to copy all of the footage from the Mac drives to a NTFS drive if the final edit will happen on a Windows machine.
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Thank you very much for your input.
Do you know if formatting the external hard drives to DOS would help at all? I’ve read in a few places that drives in the DOS format rather than FAT32 can be read on both Macs and PCs.
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We use Paragon NTFS for Mac, and Macdrive for Windows.
Macdrive works great! I don’t notice any difference between a mac or a windows drive in MC. Reads and writes without any hickups.
With Paragon NTFS there’s one problem in MC. It reads fine, but when I try to export to a ntfs disc, it won’t work.
I don’t know if it is because of Paragon software of it is something else, but that’s my experience/Stefan
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ExFat is a great format that can be used read/write with both PC (XP, Vista, Win 7) and MAC (10.6.5 or greater) without any additional software or file size limitations. The issue we have found has been with people’s MACs not having OS 10.6.5 or greater.
Ricky
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Also, if you use MediaFour MacDrive, about $40 for each PC on which you need to read/write, you can then format all drives for MAC, OR as input from above formatted NTFS
Ricky
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