Jeff Lewis
January 20th, 2014, 09:48 AM
Hi, actually not sure if I'm posting this in the right place, but since it deals with Canon XF100, I'll give it a shot.
My typical scenario for working with the XF100 is, each shoot day, I'll connect a CF reader via USB and two external hard drives. I'll copy the entire contents of each card in its own folder on the two individual external drives. This is done via a macbook pro. Then edit on the same macbook accessing the footage from one of the drives. This has worked well and is pretty straightforward, obviously.
For an upcoming shoot, the goal is to travel very, very light. I'd hoped some of the phones had gotten to the point where they could act as a conduit for getting the footage copied from a card to an external drive, but doesn't appear to be the case yet.
I've researched the Surface Pro tablet, and seems like it would work. With a full size USB 3 port, I think I could connect a hub, plug in the CF reader and one (or two) external drives, and simply copy the folders as I've always done.
But here's where my ignorance of windows vs mac really starts to show up...
As I understand it, the external drives would have to be formatted ahead of time to FAT32 to be able to be used with Windows (to get the footage from the Surface to the external drives) and Mac (to edit in FCP). If that's true, I'm also seeing a deal killer in that FAT32 will not let you work with individual files over 4GB. While we rarely have an individual file that large (though some interviews could easily be) I'm wondering if that would impact trying to pull over the entire CONTENTS folder (usually around 30GB).
And I'm not sure if there are any other potential problems with going from Windows to Mac with these type of files.
So, anyone have experience working with a Windows to Mac workflow with the Canon XF? Does the above sound accurate? Any suggestions for a good workflow for backing up audio with as little gear (figuratively and literally) as possible?
Thanks very much for helping me out.
Jeff
My typical scenario for working with the XF100 is, each shoot day, I'll connect a CF reader via USB and two external hard drives. I'll copy the entire contents of each card in its own folder on the two individual external drives. This is done via a macbook pro. Then edit on the same macbook accessing the footage from one of the drives. This has worked well and is pretty straightforward, obviously.
For an upcoming shoot, the goal is to travel very, very light. I'd hoped some of the phones had gotten to the point where they could act as a conduit for getting the footage copied from a card to an external drive, but doesn't appear to be the case yet.
I've researched the Surface Pro tablet, and seems like it would work. With a full size USB 3 port, I think I could connect a hub, plug in the CF reader and one (or two) external drives, and simply copy the folders as I've always done.
But here's where my ignorance of windows vs mac really starts to show up...
As I understand it, the external drives would have to be formatted ahead of time to FAT32 to be able to be used with Windows (to get the footage from the Surface to the external drives) and Mac (to edit in FCP). If that's true, I'm also seeing a deal killer in that FAT32 will not let you work with individual files over 4GB. While we rarely have an individual file that large (though some interviews could easily be) I'm wondering if that would impact trying to pull over the entire CONTENTS folder (usually around 30GB).
And I'm not sure if there are any other potential problems with going from Windows to Mac with these type of files.
So, anyone have experience working with a Windows to Mac workflow with the Canon XF? Does the above sound accurate? Any suggestions for a good workflow for backing up audio with as little gear (figuratively and literally) as possible?
Thanks very much for helping me out.
Jeff