Advice for DV on a Windows hard drive moved on to a Mac

[woods01]

Me and a friend of mine have a time consuming problem. We've been
asked to help edit some video the catch is that there is some 30 hours
and its currently sitting on two internal hard drives that were captured
using Windows XP but the original editor can't commit the time to the
project anymore.

We are hoping to avoid having to recapture the video onto a G5
powermac since a lot of time was already spent capturing the stuff
however since we will edit on FCP I am wondering whether the dv will
be even compatible. I don't know what software was used to capture
the video but I feel it was probably Premiere.

Now assuming we can use the DV is it possible to simply install the
hard drives into the powermac and have OS X read them? Or is
setting up a network between a pc and the mac transfering the files
a better way?

We are looking for the most time saving option. Someone already
spent a week capturing the video before they bailed and we'd like
to avoid having to spend another week recapturing it to our machine.

Thank you for any advice.

John

[pianoman719]

An important question may be whether the files were captured as Type 1 or Type 2 AVI files. In theory, FCP should be able to open and work with Type 2 AVI files containing DV footage. Whether working with such files will be as easy as working with Mac native .dv or .mov files I don't know.

Before committing to a method, why not try a test? Either through networking, burning a data CD or DVD, or some other intermediate storage medium, transfer just one of the files and see how it works in FCP. If editing seems doable, then you can commit to moving all the files over to the Mac side.

As I recall, early versions of Max OS X would only tolerate PC hard drives that were formatted as FAT32. However, I would guess the drives from a Windows XP machine are formatted NTFS. I've heard that with Mac OS 10.4.1, NTFS support is slightly better. You can apparently read NTFS drives, but still not write to them. YMMV

This suggests that if the files themselves are usable in FCP, you temporarily install the PC drives in the G5 and try and dump the files to Mac drives so the files will be read/write (probably better for editing).

If you go that route, it might be even better to use QuickTime Pro to open each Type 2 AVI containing DV footage and export it to a .dv or .mov container on a Mac hard drive. That might not take much longer than the simple file transfer, and might (in theory) make the files more friendly to work with in FCP.

These are just my personal theories on the subject. Hope others with more experience will comment.

-Pianoman

[rumplestiltskin]

You'll need to get a FireWire case and drop the PC drive into that. (G5's are serial ATA while most PCs still use Parallel ATA and there's no way of mounting a PATA drive in the G5 without a PATA card.) Then the Mac (assuming 10.3.9[?] or better) should be able to read the NTFS volume. You could always network the PC to the Mac and enable filesharing on the PC (although that's a PITA if you're not familiar with the process).

NTFS - yes, read only, not R/W, whether in FireWire or mounted internally. Over the network, however, R/W is enabled (although for this purpose, not necessary).

Another option is to secure a spare HD and drop that into the FW case. Then connect it to the PC, format it as NTFS, copy the files to it, unmount it, and connect it to the Mac. Probably the fastest and least invasive method.

[woods01]

Good suggestion on testing the files with a data disc. We'll try that first
and if it works we are going to attempt to network the two computers.
I havn't networked cross-platform before but as we already have all the
gear to try that right away. I did find this article on it that hopefully will
be a guide:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/11/19/mac_pc.html

Thank you both for the help, I hadn't even considered the problems with
PATA drives.