All,

I have a contractor capturing DV for me. He is hooking my external hard drive (which I use on a PC) to his Mac and capturing MOV files in FCP. The trouble is that the capture process is creating about 4 files for each video clip. One is a MOV file (if I rename it that on my PC) that runs fine, and the others aren't recognized as anything on the PC. But then if I delete one of those extra files, the MOV stops running. I would worry about it at all, except that one of the extra files is the same size as the MOV, so I fear that I'm doubling the disc space that I am using.

Any input on this? I am Mac and FCP illiterate, so please use small words :).

I would love for him to be able to capture to a single MOV file that I can use in my editing.

Thanks a bunch in advance.

Well, you said it. The drive is usually on a PC, therefore it is PC formatted. Most likely it is formatted FAT32 or some other format that has a 2GB file size limit, therefore the multiple files. These files still work with FCP, but they all need to be present.

BUT...it is best to work with a drive Mac formatted (Mac OS Extended) in order to capture to it.

I'd like to add that FCP .mov files captured on an HFS+ drive and transferred to an NTFS drive work just fine and don't create large extra files. They do come with a resource fork like all Mac OS files, but you can delete that without affecting the .mov file. I do this all the time because I edit on a Mac and encode for the web on a Windows machine, so I guarantee it works.