Workflow question

[Craig Seeman]

If one is shooting on SDHC cards, a basic MacBook has built in SDHC slot.
If one is only using SxS, a 17″ MacBook Pro is the only Mac option and very expensive relative to PCs with Express ports. I think it’s a real shame Apple went this route. I’m lucky enough to have a 15″ MacBook Pro 2008 with Express slot although these days I’m shooting on SDHC for the most part.

[Peter Humble]

Just wondering how you transfer your footage to Mac from PC.
I’ve just spent a few hours tearing my hair out trying to reformat my external drive so it can read/write across platforms and ended up down all sorts of dark paths that are way over my head.

[Craig Seeman]

If you’re moving the BPAV have you tried FAT32?
The cards are FAT32 and are read/write by both Mac and Windows.
Macs can read NTFS but can’t write to them natively. There are some very inexpensive Mac utilities which allow them to write to NTFS. Programs like Parallels and Fusion come with those

I Bootcamped my Mac and have Parallels. I open Parallels, drag the file to Windows 7. Reboot into Windows 7 and I have a fully functional Windows computer.

Two programs that allow Macs to write to NTFS are
MacFuse
Paragon
You won’t need Parallels for that.

[Peter Humble]

Oops, Hold everything….I just got it to work by installing TUXERA:

http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

I wish I had have found this a few hours ago. Seems like a great product.

So for those also wondering about this, the first step was to reformat my Mac drive to NTSF on a Windows machine. This took quite a long time. Then install TUXERA on your Mac and it just instantly picks up the newly formatted NTSF drive and gives it full read/write status.

After all that, this extremely untechie guy is very pleased with himself 🙂

[Craig Seeman]

Good find. I hadn’t heard of that one.

[Bill Skinner]

I have been using the Sony PXU-MS240 drive system to off-load from the SxS cards without a laptop. In the last 3 months here in Afghanistan it has worked without failure transferring over 4TB of footage.

Bill Skinner
On assignment – Afghanistan