I have a performer who wants a video of her concert that I shot on a flash drive. It needs to go to NYC. I know a lot of you put your weddings on flash drive, but I don't know how big they are.

The video is approximately 10 to 12 GB and edit using FCPX. I shared the document as a master file to my hard drive. The file will not go onto my 32g flash drive. "... can’t be copied because it is too large for the volume's format."

Should I attempt to reformat the flash drive to NTFS? I'm not even sure I know how, but I could look it up.

Is this a format another editor should be able to use? (I have no idea what system they'd be using.)

Worst case ... I'll ship it out on one of my older hard drives.

Thanks for any suggestions as this needs to go out in tomorrow's mail.

Scott

Try formatting the Flash drive to EXFAT.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

Use exFAT. More universal than NTFS.

Your right in that the file system needs changing. FAT32 which most drives come as will only handle files upto 4GB. NTFS will work but isn't great for flash drives plus is read only in macs. exFAT will be just fine for any recent(ish) pc and mac. Plus its a format designed for the removable nature of flash drives.

Thank you, both!!!!

Very interesting thread. I was not familiar with exfat. I have been giving my clients NTFS formatted drives for ages with no issues.

I just read up on exfat and apparently it's the default system used on SDXC cards over 32GB in size, but is intended for use where fat 32 is used like in electronics that use fat 32 system, such as a Panasonic GH2.

Since the vast majority of PCs and Macs use NTFS file system (at least I believe that is true), it would appear that NTFS would actually be a better choice for USB sticks where it's going to be played back on a computer.

NTFS was designed by Microsoft and will work on both Macs and PCs. I do know that Windows operating systems have been running on NTFS file system for ages, don't remember when but sometime around XP or so maybe Vista? I vaguely remember the change happening but not specifically when.