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HELP PLEASE! Hard Drive Trouble With Final Cut Pro

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Hi!

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my thread. I am in a total pickle at the moment. I have been shooting a mini documentary on a handheld HD cam. I was out of the country, so I was storing all of my footage as I went on a portable external hard drive. The hard drive is a 1TB Seagate Free Agent portable USB. I had brought a mini netbook with me on the trip to use as the portal to upload footage off of my camera, onto the external hard drive.

Now that I am back home, I am trying to edit the footage I have on Final Cut Pro, using my Mac Book Pro. The problem is, I am able to only read footage from the external hard drive. I cannot write anything to it or create new folders in it from the Mac etc. I was under the impression (I feel like an idiot if I flubbed this one), that I could edit in Final Cut Pro on my mac, right off of the portable USB Seagate 1TB Freeagent Hard Drive that I saved everything on. Now I am finding out there are all these issues with NTFS and FAT32. Apparently my external hard drive is a formatted for NTFS and not FAT32. So I spoke with a Mac rep on the phone and they said the way to do this is to move all the footage off the external hard drive and on to another location and then erase the hard drive and reformat for FAT32 and then put the footage back on it. However, I am now reading stuff online about having to use ATA, FireWire, SCSI, RAID or Fibre Channel drives for editing with FCP.
Is this Seagate 1TB Free Agent External Hard Drive that I have ALL my footage on USELESS?? How am I ever going to get my footage into Final Cut Pro now?? I need serious guidance from you experts out there...I am new at all this stuff and that is becoming very obvious. Please, PLEASE write me some suggestions and share some advice...I really appreciate. THANKS SO MUCH!!
R
 
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Easy solution - if your drive is full, just get another external drive, format it for FAT32 or HFS+, then copy all of your footage off of your drive you took with you onto the new drive. Once it's on the new drive that is either HFS+ or FAT32, you'll have no problem reading/writing/etc.

Your only issue right now is that the existing external is formatted in a way that OSX can't write to. You could install NTFS-3G, but as this is what I would deem critical footage that is irreplaceable, to me, it'd be worth it to just get a second drive, and copy the footage off.

It would seriously help if you had a firewire drive to be your scratch drive - although it is possible to edit HD footage using a USB drive, it's not the most pleasant thing in the world. FireWire is your cheapest option - you don't require a raid, you don't require SCSI, you don't require Fibre Channel, you don't require SerialATA - these things make it more pleasant to edit with the software because of the speed and throughput that the technologies offer but not everyone can afford such beasts. With you having a Macbook Pro you should have a firewire port, if new enough, it's a FW800 port which will be great. You can get an external drive chassis that supports FW400, FW800, USB and eSATA for not too much money and buy a nice 7200rpm drive to put into it and connect it to your laptop. Then connect your existing drive, make sure the drive connected via FW is formatted for HFS+ (you'll really need it HFS to edit with since FC creates HUGE files which exceed the max file size of FAT32 when working with HD footage), and set as your scratch drive.

Then import the footage from your other drive into your project, it should copy it over if you're able to use log and transfer, if it doesn't copy it over for you, you can always copy the files over yourself.

This is not a total disaster, and is recoverable.
 

rman


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I believe that I read on one of the threads on this forum. That there is an application that will let you write to an NTFS drive from MAC OS X.
 
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Yes, there is - I mentioned one of them (ntfs3g), and there is also a product called from a company called Paragon Software Group called Paragon NTFS, but you really don't want to be using an NTFS formatted drive to edit video on OSX. A lot of data has to get pushed and pulled with regard to a scratch drive, and people have had issues before with data corruption on NTFS drives when using one of these products - although those two products work very well, they aren't what many would call 100% stable, and to me the risk is too great when dealing with footage that can't be replaced.

There are some things that are just better done in the native file system. Video editing, when done on Mac, should use scratch drives in HFS+, on a PC running windows NTFS, etc.
 
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Final Cut will NOT edit with a drive of any format but Mac OS Extended (not journaled). USB is not enough sustained data rate for video editing, either. Final Cut does not support USB drives at all, that alone is asking for major headaches.

Again, Final Cut will NOT edit on an NTFS drive AT ALL! You simply can't physically do it.

You'll need a Firewire 800, 7200rpm, Mac OS Extended, non-journaled drive to edit with in Final Cut, nothing else will work, period.

Move your data to the proper drive, and you'll be fine. Check Other World Computing for great, durable drives at good prices, and top notch tech support.
 
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Final Cut will NOT edit with a drive of any format but Mac OS Extended (not journaled). USB is not enough sustained data rate for video editing, either. Final Cut does not support USB drives at all, that alone is asking for major headaches.

Again, Final Cut will NOT edit on an NTFS drive AT ALL! You simply can't physically do it.

You'll need a Firewire 800, 7200rpm, Mac OS Extended, non-journaled drive to edit with in Final Cut, nothing else will work, period.

Move your data to the proper drive, and you'll be fine. Check Other World Computing for great, durable drives at good prices, and top notch tech support.

I know I am responding to an old post but I have some dissagreement. Pretty harsh and stern stance from the writer. First, I don't know about the issue of the NTFS issue and editing from FCP. Given my understanding, or lack thereof, of the format and it's limitation, I will give you the fact that you may not be able to edit using it. However, the issue about USB drives is flat out wrong. It may be better for speed "Sustained Data Rate" etc. to use Firewire but to say that "Again, Final Cut will NOT edit " and "Final Cut does not support USB drives at all" or "nothing else will work, period." is plain wrong.

I use USB drives all the time. I have used them extensively for over 2 years now and have never had a major issue. I have had no issue until upgrading to the newest Final Cut Studio. Now I am always confronted with a message, not about USB but about using Fat 32. Also, I occasionally, more often now than before, am getting drop frame warnings when playing back my video. It may slow me down a little but it doesn't stop me from editing my programs and DOES NOT effect my final result. If I were printing to tape, or playing the video out of my computer into a recorder it might be a problem. However, I always export my finished projects to Quicktime files or DVD files through Export, Share or Compressor. In those cases, I do not notice any issues with using USB drives with my FCP work. Other than MAYBE some speed issues with processing. Definitely, given a choice, I would use a Firewire drive and usually have with the larger My Book drives. However, they have always been large, cumbersome NOT PORTABLE etc. Recently I found the iOmega portable drives that have Firewire and USB and bought a couple of those. 500gig and available at Bestbuy for about $120. Good value, Firewire, as small as the WD Passports and made of metal and possibly more durable. Given a choice now, you can see what I would choose but to say that you CAN NOT edit with a USB drive is incorrect.
 
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FCP and 4GB limit on FAT32

I am currently working on a documentary in which I need to work off my external hard drive, which is a Western Digital formatted as FAT32. However, when I changed my FCP systems settings so that video capture would occur on my hard drive, it comes up with a message "The selected disk is formatted using FAT32 which has a 4GB file limit. Using it as a scratch disk will lead to unpredictable behavior when using or creating larger files." I'm not sure what this means. Does it mean that each individual video clip I transfer into FCP cannot be larger than 4GB? I am working with about 120GB of footage total, but if they are divided into small clips when logging and transferring, will I have problems?

If anyone has any answers I would really appreciate it, as I'm on a time crunch! Thank you in advance!!
 
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I have to say that I have been using an external USB portable drive for at least a year now and have not had any major issues. If you needed to archive your footage, I would definitely use a Firewire drive, but for temporary portability, a USB drive should be fine. There are probably some circumstances in which it would be less than optimal however.
 

chscag

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I'm not sure what this means. Does it mean that each individual video clip I transfer into FCP cannot be larger than 4GB? I am working with about 120GB of footage total, but if they are divided into small clips when logging and transferring, will I have problems?

If anyone has any answers I would really appreciate it, as I'm on a time crunch! Thank you in advance!!

Yes, that's correct. Each individual clip will have to be smaller than 4 GB in order to write it to the drive. FAT-32 is limited to a 4 GB file size. It would probably be a better idea - rather than dividing the clips into smaller segments - to reformat the drive as HFS+ (Mac format) which has no such limitation.
 

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