Switching from Premiere to FCP
 

We are going to switch from Premiere to FCP at my church and I wanted to back up our tapes to an external hard drive in preparation of the switch. Is there a particular format that I need to save the video files as? Also, the files that we have on Premiere already, what can we save that as to make it compatible with Mac?

The is a program called mac drive. It lets pc's read and write mac formatted drives and its around 40 bucks I think. My work and I use it and it works like a charm. Although if you don't plan on ever going back to a pc then you can scrap the idea since mac os x can read but not write ntfs.

You could use FAT32 because mac will read and write to it, but be aware you're limited to a 4GB file size. So unless you break up your video into 4GB pieces FAT32 is not the way to go. I learned this the hard way :)

I need the videos that we've already downloaded to Premiere on the PC to be read by the Mac. Also, we have a lot of videos on dv tapes; should we download them to premiere and transfer to Mac later or should we just wait until we get the Mac's to download the videos there?

the mac will be able to read the files you've already captured to the PC's disc ... it will not be able to write to the PC's disc, but will have no trouble reading from it. don't know what format you've captured as with your Premiere system but chances are that FCP will be able to read those files although it will not be optimal

to ensure better compatibility with your new NLE your best bet would be to wait for your new Mac before capturing any more of the source tapes

I made the same transition a couple of years ago.

FCP will read the AVI files that Premiere uses as source clips. Usually it doesn't have to render them. So unless you just want to, you don't have to convert your captured source files.

Something to keep in mind is if you ever want to work in a former Premiere project, you'll need to export an EDL for each project. You can import that into FCP, reconnect the source files to their location on the Mac and pick up where you left off.