Giving Raw Footage To Client
 

I'm not sure if this is the right sub forum to post this, but I thought 'what the heck'.

I shot a wedding a few months ago on my EX-1, and my client is having a difficult time coming up with the balance they owe me since one of them lost their job. We negotiated for me to just give them the raw footage cause they've paid me half. However, I'm not sure how to get the footage to them, cause there's about 38GB of it. I suppose I could burn it onto a dozen DVD's but that seems impractical and expensive.

Do you guys have any ideas? I considered finding an inexpensive external hard drive but I use a Mac and they have a PC so if I format it one way it might not be recognized by the other. Plus buying a portable drive just so they can get their footage seems like a bit over-the-top, but then again maybe I'm wrong.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks guys!

It's not worth the hassle to burn a bunch of DVDs. For $60 you can dump the BPAV folders on a Passport Drive and let them deal with it from there. The Passport drives are compatible with Mac and PC right out of the box.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/673579-REG/Western_Digital_WDBAAA2500ABK_NESN_250GB_My_Passport_Essential.html

Wouldn't their PC be unable to recognize the Passport once it's formatted for a Mac system? If that's the case it'd be a waste of time and money to grab one of those drives, upload the footage to it and then when they hook it up to their PC Windows asks them to format it — thus deleting all that footage.

There is a cheap program called "Mac Drive" available for the PC world. It allows PC users to read any mac drive.(Your client could buy this program to read your Mac formatted disc) Or on the mac you can install a program called "MacFuse" which allows you to write to a PC formatted drive. In Snow Leopard you can also activate the capability to write to PC drives, but it is not officially supported yet. You will have to use a terminal command to activate this capability.

No extra software is necessary. I have doszens of Passport drives that I move regularly between both Macs and PCs. There's absolutely no problem at all. The drives come pre-fromatted to work with both platforms. You can only screw that up if you take the trouble to reformat it differently. You just plug in the USB cable and it shows up on the desktop whether you're using a Mac or a PC. And you don't even need a power supply.

Disks formatted as FAT32 can be used on both mac and windows without the need of any programs like macdrive. The downside of this kind of partion is that partions have a maximum size of 32 GB. So you will have to have at least 2 partions for all the data.

If both parties have a Blu-ray drive (and you've got a burner), you could consider burning 2 Blu-rays.

How do explain the fact that I can plug a 250GB (MS-DOS FAT32) drive into one of my Macs or a PC and see every file on the drive, with no partitioning that I can see?

The Disk Utility in the Mac OS was built to read FAT32 (windows) partions. This has been the case since OS9. Hence the reason for Doug saying that he has access to the full 250GB on both Mac and PC platforms.

Now NTFS paritions (windows) will require the two different partions you mention or something like macdrive. Cheers!

What about if I were to pickup a ~32GB Flash Drive (I may be able to sort through my footage and whittle it down to 32GB or less). They run roughly the same price as a Passport drive but it'd probably be easier to hand off to my client. Anybody know if the compatibility is similar to the Passport?

Yes, the Flash drives like SDHC cards are or can be formatted so that both Mac's and PC's can read/write to them. The one major drawback is that 32GB and larger varieties are slow as molasses in January (a Canadian expression) to write and read to.

Time is money, for us and for the customer. In my experience, 16GB Flash or SDHC is as large as I go, for anything larger I use an SSD or harddrive. The best thing is to give 32GB a try to determine if it is workable for your needs, then decide how to proceed. Cheers!

I forgot about FAT32 - you guys are right, no additional program is needed to read and write to it on a Mac. But the file size is limited to 4GB IIRC? But the EX1 cant produce any files larger than 4GB as well, so it would not matter if you just want to give them the raw footage.

Or, since they've already paid half, you could finish the job and let them make payments on the balance... maybe put a watermark over the footage, just in case?

I can....

As far as I remember formatting to FAT32 was limited to partitions of 32GB. But the last time I did format to FAT32 was in 2002, so I could be wrong. But I'm not wrong according to File Allocation Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I did the format on a XP computer and on XP FAT32 formatting is limited to 32GB. On other other systems (except windows 98, 2000 and older) it should be possible to create partions up to 2TB.

The technical reasons of how/why the drives do what they do doesn't interest me in the least. My point to the original poster is that you can simply buy the drive and use it with both Macs and PCs without doing ANYTHING special. Plug & Play. All files will be visble. No re-formatting is necessary. The USB bus-powered drives are convenient, cheap, reliable, and very easy to use. That's all I need to know about them.

Agree 100%. Just buy it. Plug it in and go nuts, Mac or PC.

for the technical, yes there was a 32GB limit per partition and 4GB files size, but only formatting using windows. If you use an after-market program like Acronis Disk Director or countless others you can make the Fat 32 partition as big as you like, thats why you can buy 1TB Fat 32 partitioned drives from the factory.

Fat32 - read/write Mac and PC, 4GB individual file maximum
NTFS - read only Mac, read/write PC

The other point is they're pretty much stuffed with the raw footage anyway as they're not really going to be able to edit EX1 raw footage if they're not skilled/computer savvy. They really just need the footage in a drawer somewhere until they can afford to pay someone to do something right?

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.

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.