Hi folks. I have a problem that needs urgent attention. I've been given an external drive that has HD footage in MTS format. This external drive has been formatted and written on using a Mac system. Now I have a PC and need to access this footage immediately - I want to edit this in Sony Vegas Pro 9. Not surprisingly, the Mac external drive does not show up on my Windows XP system when I connect it through the standard USB2 port (it does not have FireWire either). What to do? I need access to this footage urgently. Please help!

Try Mediafour | MacDrive (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/). Or find somebody with a Mac and transfer the files to a Windows formatted drive. Formatting the drive with FAT will make it easily accessible on both platforms.

Mediafour | MacDrive might just work - but copy the files to your local drives before using them, in my experience MacDrive slows things down a bit.

FAT32 formatted drives might indeed be a good solution, but be aware that there can be no files larger than 4GB on a FAT32 formatted drive!

I have been using Transmac for some years now and it works a treat for reading Mac drives on a PC. Check out all details at:

TransMac Details (http://www.asy.com/scrtm.htm)

I've used MacDrive to round-trip several films with Mac folks. It makes the process seamless, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I've got another film coming in in 60 days that will be cut on FCP and I will be doing color on in Vegas or Avid. And MacDrive will make that process trivial for us.

Thanks for all the help guys! Will definitely try out these programs and techniques. Since I have HD video footage I'm guessing some clips might be larger than 4GB.

Cheers!