Converting PC to Mac question...

[Ocramed]

Hi!

I have a PC-oriented external hard drive with video mpegs (115 files at 1.9 GB). A friend of mine said that she could edit them, except that her video editing software is Final Cut Pro...on a Mac. Now, what are the ways to get the mpegs files from my hard drive, so that Mac can use them? The hard drive is NTFS formatted. Now, is there a hard drive that both a PC and Mac can use? I have to buy a hard drive anyway. What about USB flash drives? Are they compatible? Can zip file formatting be used as an alternative? If a 1.9 GB is compressed, how many can be compressed, so that I could up load to a file sharing website that will allow 2.0 GB per folder (www.yousendin.com)? I appreciate all the help I can get.

O.

 

[Ocramed]

Hi!

I have a PC-oriented external hard drive with video mpegs (115 files at 1.9 GB). A friend of mine said that she could edit them, except that her video editing software is Final Cut Pro...on a Mac. Now, what are the ways to get the mpegs files from my hard drive, so that Mac can use them? The hard drive is NTFS formatted. Now, is there a hard drive that both a PC and Mac can use? I have to buy a hard drive anyway. What about USB flash drives? Are they compatible? Can zip file formatting be used as an alternative? If a 1.9 GB is compressed, how many can be compressed, so that I could up load to a file sharing website that will allow 2.0 GB per folder (www.yousendin.com)? I appreciate all the help I can get.

O.

Oops, the correct address is www.yousendit.com. Sorry about that.

O.

 

[Malice]

no answer on this one from me....

 

[adam-red]

If you need to buy a new external anyway then theres always the option of formatting it as FAT32:
http://www.geniusdv.com/news_and_tu...rmatted-external-hard-drive-to-read-on-pc.php

 

[Mixairian]

If you need to buy a new external anyway then theres always the option of formatting it as FAT32:
http://www.geniusdv.com/news_and_tu...rmatted-external-hard-drive-to-read-on-pc.php

+1

New device. Format FAT32, transfer the stuff over.

Yousendit is a good option.

Megaupload and Rapidshare are also good free alternatives though they'll take a while.

 

[strikezone89]

I'd love to help but I know nothing about Mac's

 

[YourBrokenAmp]

First of all, you can plug your external NTFS HD into your friend's Mac and transfer any data onto the Mac's internal HD for now, in case your friend wants to start editing the videos ASAP. OS X 10.4.1 and above can read NTFS drives, just not write to them.

Now as far as getting the data back... You mentioned you are planning on buying a new external HD anyways, so like adam-red mentioned above, you could just format that HD as a FAT32. Both Windows and OS X can read and write to it. The only thing with FAT32 is you will be capped to a 4 GB limit file size. If that isn't going to be a problem for you in the future, then that would be the best option. But I do have to mention that both either NTFS or HFS+ (Mac) are more stable file systems then FAT32.

If the 4 GB limit is going to be a problem in the future, then obviously a FAT32 HD is not an option at all. Let me know whether it will be or not, and I can reply back with some other ways you can go about it.