Moving Files Between Hard Drives
 

I'm afraid I have a big mess on my hands. And I need some advice.

Before I bought my new G5, I needed to get some files off of a borrowed capture drive in a hurry, so I bought the only drive I could get my hands on that day -- a Seagate USB 160G. A friend transfered the files from the capture drive to the new drive and cleared her capture drive.

Since then I've captured about 13 hours of miniDV footage to the Seagate and have begun a project in FCE. Just the other day I was adding a LaCie 160GB firewire to capture more footage when I discovered that the Seagate was not initialized. It's in MS-DOS format.

So, I'm thinking of trashing all the DV footage and the project files and starting over, but I'd like to know what would be the best way to treat the .mov files that were brought in from the capture drive. Do I simply move them over to the correctly-formatted Lacie and then initialize the Seagate? Are they all ready corrupted?

Any help understaning this is greatly appreciated!

Also, any thoughts on why, when trying to export the project files to burn on DVD, the .mov clips won't go?

There shouldn't be any issues with file corruption on an MSDOS drive, but it affects performance (and there may be some filename issues). I made the same mistake once and the drive wouldn't work for capture or playback without dropping frames.

You should be able to copy everything between drives using the Finder, however that's generally a lot slower than using a backup utility in my experience. I got a copy of "Personal Backup X3" a couple years ago and have been using it for this sort of thing. It's significantly faster than copies using the finder. I'm sure there are a lot of other options out there as well, but for a one-shot thing like this you might as well just drag the files over to the other disk.

Thanks Boyd! So do you think that it'd be a waste of time to recapture the DV footage to the Lacie, that it would be the same difference just to move it from the Seagate?

I can't see why there would be a problem, but it's easy enough to copy it over and give it a try. Since it's digital it will either work or it won't, it won't lose quality due to the copying like analog tapes do.

True enough... it's worth trying. Then I'll have the thrill of learning about reconnecting offline clips. Thanks for your help.

Any thoughts on getting a hard copy of the help menu? I don't have a printer hooked up yet, and probably wouldn't want to print our the nearly 1000 page menu if I did, but I sure would like to peruse it from the couch or the porch swing.

Oh that's too bad... doesn't FCE include hard copy manuals? FCP comes with about 20 pounds of printed material :-) I guess you could copy the PDF's to a CD or USB drive and take them somewhere like Kinkos to get hard copy.

No, there's a 250 page Soundtrack user's manual and a 150 page Getting Started manual. I guess that's one of the reasons FCE costs $600 less than FCP. :-)

Yet another good idea from Boyd on the Kinko suggestion! You're the man!

I've got another question I'm sure you could answer, but I'd better post it as a new thread in a different forum so that more can benefit.

Thanks for sharing your wisdom and expertise! Invaluable!

FW or USB
 

My capture drive is usb2/fw but I use the usb ports and save my fw bus for the camera. I ran into an interesting problem on the road when I tried to use the same drive with a firewire instead of usb. I had tons of problems mounting the drive, the computer wouldnt see both partitions etc, it even caused some weird issue where the startup apple was this weird blotch of color. I switched back to usb later and everything was fine again. Don't know if this is applicable just trying to help. Good Luck.

It's good that works for you. The "net wisdom" is that you shouldn't use USB for FCP, but this is just anecdotal and I haven't tried myself. I know people like to use USB drives on Windows also. I never had any problems capturing to an external firewire drive on my 1ghz 15" Aluminum Powerbook, but I got a firewire PC card like this "just in case" since I was going to be out of the country doing a lot of editing:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1074787928197

Must have been on sale when I got because it was less than $40. But it works great and also speeds up copies between 2 firewire drives when they're each on a separate bus.

BTW, when you format an external media drive as MacOS Extended be sure that you turn journaling OFF. I've never had capture problems on a journaled drive, but I've had problems with print to video (even on a fast internal drive).