Shooter is PC | Editor is Mac

[Mike Chandler]

Originally Posted by Ed Kukla

the macdrive people said I could not do clipbrowser on a pc, moving clips to a mac formatted hard drive. Were they wrong? Overly cautious? I repeated the question back to them to make sure I wasn't misstating the issue and they were insistant macdrive and clipbrowser are incompatible.

After not being able to transfer using Clipbrowser, that's what they told me, too. Maybe it's because I was going Firewire, not usb.

[Ola Christoffersson]

I think you are making this into a bigger problem than it is. The filestructure of the BPAV-folders has nothing to do with wheather you are on a Mac or a PC. The only problem you could run into is the Mac not being able to read the file system of the drive. FAT32 would be the solution to this. The EX1/3-files don't ever exceed the 4 GB limit, even after combining clips. An NTFS-drive should also work. As long as you do not need to write to the drive the Mac should be able to read NTFS-drives.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Ola Christoffersson

The EX1/3-files don't ever exceed the 4 GB limit, even after combining clips.

Not true; when you record for long enough withoout pausing, a lot of <4GB files will be created on the card; after copying to the same BPAV directory on an NTFS drive, a single clip of a size much exceeding 4 GB can be created.

For instance, my over 1 hour live music shots usually result in >20 GB clips.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Ola Christoffersson

An NTFS-drive should also work. As long as you do not need to write to the drive the Mac should be able to read NTFS-drives.

Not necessarily true. And hasn't been true in my dealings with Mac folks. However, I did find this:

Apple - Downloads - System/Disk Utilities - NTFS-3G

So it looks like a solveable problem. I wish I had known about this utility before I spent money on Macdrive, but Macdrive still works nicely, and is convenient for me to have.

[Mike Chandler]

I decided to try MacDrive again, and this time it worked. Don't know if it's because I bypassed the express card/firewire adapter and used usb instead, or whether it's because it was MacDrive 8 vs. 7, but the pc laptop is indeed seeing the mac formatted drive and clip browser is copying the bpav folder.

It's not playing the clips, but I think that's a function of the netbook capabilities (Lenovo S12).

[Ola Christoffersson]

Originally Posted by Piotr Wozniacki

Not true; when you record for long enough withoout pausing, a lot of <4GB files will be created on the card; after copying to the same BPAV directory on an NTFS drive, a single clip of a size much exceeding 4 GB can be created.

For instance, my over 1 hour live music shots usually result in >20 GB clips.

I should really test this before posting again but I guess I have to live with the shame if I turn out to be wrong anyway...

Piotr - you may very well end up with "clips" that are larger than 4 GB when browsing in Clip Browser or after importing into your editing software or exporting as MXF. BUT as long as the files are native EX-files in a BPAV-folder the FILES should not exceed 4 GB. The metadata informs the system of which 4 GB files should be combined to play back your 20 GB Clip.

[Ola Christoffersson]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

Not necessarily true. And hasn't been true in my dealings with Mac folks.

Of course this is not true of all versions of Mac OS. I don't know when the Mac became able to read NTFS but I have not had a problem moving a NTFS-disk back and forth to a friends Mac and he is running some flavour of OS X.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Ola Christoffersson

I should really test this before posting again but I guess I have to live with the shame if I turn out to be wrong anyway...

Piotr - you may very well end up with "clips" that are larger than 4 GB when browsing in Clip Browser or after importing into your editing software or exporting as MXF. BUT as long as the files are native EX-files in a BPAV-folder the FILES should not exceed 4 GB. The metadata informs the system of which 4 GB files should be combined to play back your 20 GB Clip.

Ola,

This is an academic discussion; of course on FAT32 media (like the SxS), you cannot exceed the single file size limit.

I was talking about results of combining folders on your non-FAT32 HDD using ClipBrowser (same occurs when you just copy the same take's chunks into the same directory; of course using ClipBrowser, not your OS's tools).

If I mentioned it, is because to me it's important to have each take in a single (however big) file. Editing music videos, I need to cut/split the clips where the music requires it; also I'm usually edit in multi-camera mode. You can realize how many split/cut points I'm getting; to keep things tidy I prefer that there's no additional splits due to any files size limits...

But re: the original thread subject, you're of course right; as long as any single file size is within the FAT32 limits, there should be no probs exchanging them between the two platforms (and using the right tools).