mpeg files from a PC

A friend has some mpeg media files that he captured to an external firewire drive on a PC based edit system. I think he used Premiere Pro. Can copy them to my SATA RAID for use in FCP? What if I format my RAID as MS-DOS? I haven't received the drive yet, I'm trying to figure it out ahead of time.

Don't change anything. OSX can read and write to FAT-32 volumes and can read WINNT drives.
We did have one PC drive that the client delivered that we couldn't read. Nobody ever figured out why, but we got one of the producer's PC laptops to read the show for us and blow it back onto one of our drives.

I would have a portable hard drive big enough to contain it all available. Empty. You may need to change the format to FAT32 in an emergency and that destroys everything on the drive.

You may be stuck with USB, too. Relatively few PCs have FireWire--so get dual USB/SFireWire.

Koz

That's good to know. My RAID is already empty, so I'll try usining it. But what about the actual media files? Should I anticipate any problems since they were captured on a PC? As far as I know, they are just NTSC DV.

but fcp wont see mpeg files. youll have to covert them to photojpeg or animation at 100% (avoid dv export as youll love quality) with an app like mpeg streamclip.

<<<but fcp wont see mpeg files.>>>

The system will see them, but Final Cut will not be able to open them without extra help. See: Granzin.

And, as if that wasn't enough, if the "capture" was from off-air, that, too is MPEG2, but everybody uses a different format to save them. That can be serious magic.

Koz