So I have this 1TB hard drive formatted for NTFS from my PC....it's has 350GB of video files on it. When I try to use them in FCP, it doesn't work.

I figured out that my MAC needs to reformat the HD to FAT.

My question is this:
Is there a way to retain the files on the external HD, format the HD to FAT, then bring the files into my MAC without having to erase the whole HD? I really don't want to recapture 20 hours of video....

MAC's will read NTFS, they just won't write to it. Can'y you do a "copy" to another drive and reformat?

Get the Paragon NTFS read/write plugin- that makes it simple:

Paragon NTFS for MAC OS X - full read and write access to Windows NTFS partitions under Mac OS X (http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/)

-Noah

That did the trick...thank you....transferred over ALL of my files. Awesome.