Importing spanned files (over 2gb captures)

[Tom Brooks]

You highlight a disk icon in the left panel, then read the information about it at the bottom of the window or you click the “i” for info button. When a disk is formatted, there will be one disk icon for the physical disk itself and at least one below it which is a “volume.” The volume is the one that will be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or DOS, or whatever.

[Sabreena Peters]

So I have a new question for you since you seem to know what’s going on. First of all, if my hard drive isn’t formatted to mac OS Extended, is there a way to make change part of the format without losing all the data on the hard drive? Will partitioning do that?

Also, I’m having the same problem with spanned files from a P2 card having an error when i try and import them, but it doesn’t split up the files, but instead it just tells me that there’s an unknown error. Is it possible to make FCP read the spanned files as separate files to make them easier to import?

[Tom Brooks]

[Sabreena Peters] “if my hard drive isn’t formatted to mac OS Extended, is there a way to make change part of the format without losing all the data on the hard drive? Will partitioning do that?”

It depends. If it’s formatted in NTFS or maybe FAT32, there may be a way to partition it with a Windows program like Partition Magic. But generally, the answer is that it’s not going to be cheap or easy. I don’t believe Apple Disk Utility can do this. An alternative is to copy the data to another drive temporarily and then reformat the first drive and copy the data back.

Regarding the P2, you should be able to transfer spanned files from proper P2 folders using Log and Transfer. Are you following the P2 guidelines in FCP6 HD and Broadcast Formats found in FCP Help? Within a P2 folder you should have a Contents folder and the Lastclip.txt file.