Footage delivery from Mac to PC

I have a friend who wants to edit some footage I shot. He is using a PC with Premier and I have a Mac with FCP. My question is what would be the best way to deliver the footage to him. He has provided a blank external USB drive to me. I think I will be formatting the new drive to MS DOS FAT and not sure what the best export from FCP would be. The footage was captured into my system using FCP and was shot on a Canon HV30 in HDV 1920X1080. I want to deliver the footage to him in the best quality I can regardless of file size, render time, etc.

Thanks in advance.

Frank

A number of problems present themselves right away:

Using Fat32 you're going to run into the 2GB file size limit, which is problematic when dealing with large files. Look at your Capture scratch, anything there that he needs that is bigger than 2GB?

USB is barely fast enough to stream video. It can be used to get them to him so he can transfer to a media drive but I wouldn't recommend it for regular playback.

Assuming you captured from the HV30 as native HDV files and didn't convert them to ProRes or something sensible like that, I THINK (not totally sure) that Premiere can handle the HDV codec as native. Do a test.

There are plenty of threads here about why you wouldn't want to edit in HDV, at least in FCP. The situation might be different in Premiere.

I would send him test files that don't take all day to copy and see what he can manage before you dump the whole lot on that USB drive and watch the progress bar crawl.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

You can also format the drive for Mac. Then have your friend get the trial version of MacDrive. It allows a PC to read Mac drives, and it functions perfectly for the first 14 days or so before you have to pay for it. More than enough time for him to copy the files, as long as he backs them up. Non-professional users can be awfully careless with their data.


www.derekmok.com

Or just buy him a copy of MacDrive ($50) and make further collaborations easier on you.
It's standard on most Windows boxes that I come across in post houses. So much so that I forget there is this problem until a family member wants help with their HP or Dell and it can't get the photos off my USB key.

Getting the material to him is one thing making sure his system can edit with that footage is another. Do a test!

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Or use exFAT, which is a modern file system that is supported on both Mac (10.6.5 and higher) and PC (Windows XP and higher as long as you have installed the latest updates).

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Last time I had to do this (last year), I wasn't able to format the drive as any PC format but FAT32 using a Mac. Formatting it as NTFS made it unreadable to a Mac. Perhaps there was a Mac OS update that allows this now?

I also read somewhere that if you format the drive as FAT32, but not with Windows' own software, then there is no file upper-size limit.

Might be worth it to test this out, because you'll need to know whether you format the drive with his PC or your Mac.


www.derekmok.com

Premiere (CS3 and above) can edit HDV natively.

Although the windows version does not have a preset, it can also edit ProRes files. You can either create a new sequence and manually enter the clip settings or drag a clip onto the new item icon and a new sequence will be created for you with the appropriate settings. However, if he's starting a brand new edit, just use the original HDV files.

As far as transferring the files, like others suggested, format for mac and have him use macdrive. That program saved my butt in college when everyone was using FCP and I was using premiere.

Jon, never heard of exFAT but that's awesome are there any drawbacks to using it?

The only drawback I can see is that you need OS X 10.6.5 or an updated version of Windows, so it won't work on older Macs or Windows PCs that haven't been updated.

But if you check the Wikipedia page it lists some of the limitations including a limit of 2.8 million files per subdirectory:
[en.wikipedia.org]

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...