this has developed into a mac and PC issue

I formatted a clients HD's to mac and then afterwords found out the edit was on an Avid/PC. Shouldn't the editor have been able to use those files with the Avid/PC? Editor couldn't figure it out and used FCP instead.

I'm still not clear on when mac/pc are interchangable and when they are not.

I'd go for the 12 DVD option (actually 10 discs are probably enough). Doesn't take that long to burn, and it's way cheaper than buying a hard drive.

Richard

I use a program called Paragon on my MAC. $39 dollars I believe. Allows the Mac to read & write NTFS files to a PC formatted drive. I installed clipbrowser on my clients PC laptop, copied my files to a PC formatted drive. My client can see the files on the drive and so can I.
Now, what can they do with the XDCAM files apart from viewing them, I don't know. Maybe you can hand them a hard drive with PC friendly files, WMV, AVI etc. That's if you are getting paid to convert the files.