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Can’t write to a Fat 32 drive? I don’t get it.
I just tried my first log and capture in FCP (I’m experienced with PC editing, but a FCP newbie) and fcp told me my external Fat 32 drive was read only. I tried exporting a short clip to it and that wouldn’t work either. Tried switching from USb2 to firewire and that also wouldn’t work. My understanding is that Fat 32 is okay for Mac and PC, and it does work fine for PC. But, it seems only to read (not write) on my mac mini. Actually, the reading doesn’t seem to work perfectly either as some files are hidden from the mini.
Any thoughts on what may be going wrong or what I should try from here? Thanks ahead of time for any help! -
8 Replies
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I haven’t had any luck with drives formatted with FAT 32, especially for FCP. They come up, as you say, as read only.
You should format your drive, if possible, with Mac OS Extended (not journaled) for use with FCP. Things will work much better.
Tom -
Stay away from USB 2 as well.
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Thank you both for the advice. I will have to do some reformatting tomorrow. I was wondering what was wrong with USB2 though. I figured it would probably be faster than the setup with the firewire from the mini out to the firewire external drive, then out from there to the transcoder, then its s-video out to the external monitor.
The thought was the external drive could use one of the mini’s built in USB2 ports and I’d connect the keyboard, mouse, and shuttle pro2 to the other port via a usb2 hub. But, I guess the extra speed I was looking for would only happen if the 2 ports of the mini are on a different bus, right?
Is there another reason to avoid USB2? Thanks again for the help! -
It’s not the bus that’s too slow, it’s the ATA to USB bridges in the drives that are the bottleneck… they aren’t fast enough to capture with. ATA to FireWire bridges are however…
Jerry
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Sorry Jerry, it’s late and I’m a bit sleep deprived. I’m guessing you mean ATA to FireWire bridges are fast enough for capturing. Right?
Just thought I read here a month or so ago that daisy chaining a deck to a firewire drive to the computer’s firewire did result in a big speed drop off. I believe that drop off was supposed to be the killer for capturing. Strange, before now I’ve never heard any complaints about USB2 for capturing. Actually, it was advised for use Vegas editing software with laptops if you needed to capture in the field and didn’t have a secondary hard drive built in. -
Apparenly some FW devices slow down the tranfer of other devices in the chain… so that’s why it’s best to plug in your deck or camera in it’s own port. USB 2 drives just don’t cut the mustard with Mac apparently.
Jerry
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Put the deck or camera in it’s own FW port directly connected to the Mac. If you don’t have but one port, buy a card that will give you another (like a Powerbook only comes with one FW 400 port, so adding a PCMCIA card to the mix adds another port.
Jerry
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Jerry, thank you again for all the help. Unfortunately, I bought a mini to check out FCP and planned on using the external usb2/firewire drive in the usb2 port. I didn’t know about the Mac usb2 issues and I don’t think I can upgrade anything as the mini wasn’t designed for this kind of thing.
So, if you had to chose b/t these options which one would you take?1- a firewire drive daisy chained like I mentioned or
2- a usb2 drive on one port and the usb hub with the keyboard, mouse, and shuttle pro in the other portThanks again for all the help!
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