Mac + PC Project

[Dorian]

I have about 700 GB of video from MiniDV and Hi8 that I captured into Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on a PC that I need to hand off to a person using Final Cut Pro (don't know the version) on a Mac. I can't seem to find a clear current answer about compatibility. Can any version of Final Cut Pro play the AVIs created by CS6? If not can the AVIs be converted to something FCP likes without quality loss? Also is there a good way to transport that amount of video from a PC to a Mac? An external hard drive seems the most obvious but their ideal file systems are incompatible and the FAT32 format doesn't have very video-friendly size restrictions. I found there are some paid programs that can make PCs and MACs read each other's formats, but I wanted to ask around first to make sure there isn't another way I missed. Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated, thanks!

[yoda313]

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive

That will let you work with mac drives on a pc - hfs+ format.

I've used it when I was trying to work with 4+gb files on a xbox 360 which will read hfs drives but not ntfs (and obviously will read fat32). - edit- and as an aside apparaently the 360 really only works with wmv files that are 4+gb, I must have been working with those but its been quite awhile since I worked on that project so I don't remember for sure on those particular details, but the mediafour program works just fine.

As for your other questions good luck.

If you have your original minidv tapes you could just recapture them to dv-avi and transfer that file to the formatted external drive. Unless that is you still have the original avi captured files. Than you would be good to go.

[Dorian]

Thanks for the info. I do have the captured DV AVIs. Are you saying then that Final Cut Pro on a Mac can work with the DV AVI's created by Premiere CS6 without changing them at all? I've read a lot of conflicting information on this and the person on the Mac side of this project doesn't seem to believe it can work without transcoding.

[yoda313]

Are you saying then that Final Cut Pro on a Mac can work with the DV AVI's created by Premiere CS6 without changing them at all?

I think I mentioned I can't comment on the programs as I haven't used them.

But generally speaking dv-avi is such a common format and container that I can't believe a major program COULDN'T use it.

Granted so long as they are regular standard def dv-avi and not some newer hd format. If its an hd format of some type then there may be more complications with that.

however any large editing program most likely has plugins you can buy and download to work with other formats. Again that depends on the program itself.

[Dorian]

I think I mentioned I can't comment on the programs as I haven't used them.

You mostly just inferred it so I wasn't sure. Sorry, I was just looking for some clarification.

[smrpix]

Premiere should have no trouble reading DV avi files. If for some reason it doesn't work, you should have no problem rewrapping them as .movs, no re-encoding necessary.

MacDrive is great, but recommend you format the drive on the Mac.