I would buy a hard drive and stripe it FAT32 to transfer/deliver the footage, but...... You need to make sure none of your files are larger than 4GB. If they are, they are too big to be saved to the drive. I'm guessing because it's a wedding, there are some loooooong clips, so I'm guessing that at least a couple of them will be over 4GB. For that reason your only option (that I know of) is to format the drive HFS+ (Macintosh only) and then have your client buy Mac Drive so they can import the files.

Are your clients going to edit the footage some day? If not, you could convert them all to WMV files using XDCAM EX Clip Browser. There will be a watermark on them, but that may not create a problem. Because they are WMV files, they will automatically be reduced in size so I doubt any of them will be larger than 4GB. This means you can save them to a FAT32 disk drive.

The 4GB file limit is no problem with raw footage as the EX1 does not produce any files larger than 4GB as well. Longer clips are automatically split by the EX1.

That is also what I thought. I told my client to buy a Passport for me to put files on - but I had to format the drive with my Mac and had to use some tool on the drive. The problem was that I didn´t have the permission to write to it. I don´t remember exactly how I did it but finally I could write to the drive.

I have several Passport drives, this was the first to be a little troublesome.

My mistake. I thought the original poster was wanting to give the client MOV files. MOV files are not split, they are full length clips. So if you give the client the BPAV folder, using the FAT32 drive you should be fine. Good point Gerald.

I was just anwsering your question...
But, indeed, you don't need to know it when the package says it's for Mac and PC.

Hi Walter, you're right. I did ask the question.

Just had a client give me a WD Passport Essentials 320gb that does not work on my Macbook Pro (small print on box indicates it needs formatting for Mac OS). Sods law every other drive Passport drive has been fine. How should I format on my Mac to be able to transfer BPAV folders that can be extracted on an Avid PC? Sorry to go over old ground.

@Bruce - Just select MS-DOS Filesystem (FAT) in the disk utility of your Macbook Pro. Pretty easy!

Thanks Gerald.

Another silly question - where is disc manager? Help cannot help me.

Bruce: its in Applications ->Utilities ->Disk Utility
In Disk Utility select the disk you want to format - select "erase" - under "format" select "MS-DOS(FAT)" - done!

Gerald meant to say "select the Erase Tab".

Good luck! :)

Thank you all.

If I'm not mistaken, the EX1 and EX3 format the media as FAT 32, hence as Doug mentioned it should present no problems in any system, be it MAC or PS, that can read that file system.

Rather than give them the raw MFX files, why not just throw all the footage into a timeline and export as one large Quicktime file? This is easily done in FCP... not sure about other editors. At least this way they'll be able to play the footage continuously rather than have to sort through each clip with Sony Clip Browser.