Robert Ikenberry
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If you have access to a Mac formatted portable drive or can connect the Mac drive directly to the PC you can use one of several programs that allow PCs to read Mac formatted drives (MacDrive is one I’ve used successfully http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/ – I think you can download a 5 day demo version).
With these programs your PC can read the large file on the Mac drive and can copy it to a NTFS PC drive (which the Mac can also read, but can’t write to directly).
This is how I’ve transferred 10+ GB capture files. Hope this helps, or am I missing something?
Rob Ikenberry
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This is my first post (ever), so please advise if anything is out of line…
I second Shane’s good advice. I also use Acomdata 80GB bus-powered portable drives (dual USB/Firewire), they are available for $200 or less. Most of my workflow has been with a PC for field capture which gives the added benefit of a Panasonic P2 viewer to verify that the clips are successfully transfered to the portable field drive. To my knowledge, the Panasonic viewers will not work with the Mac. You will either need a 3rd party viewer or to pull up the card in FCP and verify that it can see the underlying clips. Pre-creating subdirectories for each card is also my workflow and a real plus. I try to always have two separate copies of the entire P2 card contents. If, like me, your budget does not allow you to permanently archive the portable drive as a “master tape”, after you have transferred your files to your larger drive, you can create DVD back-ups (you will have to split the files if using 8 GB cards and single layer DVDs – be sure to preserve the entire structure and “lastclip.txt” file). Then you can erase the drive and use it on the next shoot.
I don’t try to store any of the cards on a laptop internal drive except in emergency and duplicate the portable drive to the larger storage as soon as practical. You will have a single copy of the clips for a brief time until they are transfered, but after shooting about 80 cards worth of data in the past couple of months I have never had a single problem.
Rob Ikenberry