Giving Raw Footage To Client

[Andrew Slankard]

I'm not sure if this is the right sub forum to post this, but I thought 'what the heck'.

I shot a wedding a few months ago on my EX-1, and my client is having a difficult time coming up with the balance they owe me since one of them lost their job. We negotiated for me to just give them the raw footage cause they've paid me half. However, I'm not sure how to get the footage to them, cause there's about 38GB of it. I suppose I could burn it onto a dozen DVD's but that seems impractical and expensive.

Do you guys have any ideas? I considered finding an inexpensive external hard drive but I use a Mac and they have a PC so if I format it one way it might not be recognized by the other. Plus buying a portable drive just so they can get their footage seems like a bit over-the-top, but then again maybe I'm wrong.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks guys!

[Doug Jensen]

It's not worth the hassle to burn a bunch of DVDs. For $60 you can dump the BPAV folders on a Passport Drive and let them deal with it from there. The Passport drives are compatible with Mac and PC right out of the box.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/673579-REG/Western_Digital_WDBAAA2500ABK_NESN_250GB_My_Passport_Essential.html

[Andrew Slankard]

Wouldn't their PC be unable to recognize the Passport once it's formatted for a Mac system? If that's the case it'd be a waste of time and money to grab one of those drives, upload the footage to it and then when they hook it up to their PC Windows asks them to format it — thus deleting all that footage.

[Gerald Loidl]

There is a cheap program called "Mac Drive" available for the PC world. It allows PC users to read any mac drive.(Your client could buy this program to read your Mac formatted disc) Or on the mac you can install a program called "MacFuse" which allows you to write to a PC formatted drive. In Snow Leopard you can also activate the capability to write to PC drives, but it is not officially supported yet. You will have to use a terminal command to activate this capability.

[Doug Jensen]

No extra software is necessary. I have doszens of Passport drives that I move regularly between both Macs and PCs. There's absolutely no problem at all. The drives come pre-fromatted to work with both platforms. You can only screw that up if you take the trouble to reformat it differently. You just plug in the USB cable and it shows up on the desktop whether you're using a Mac or a PC. And you don't even need a power supply.

[Walter Brokx]

Disks formatted as FAT32 can be used on both mac and windows without the need of any programs like macdrive. The downside of this kind of partion is that partions have a maximum size of 32 GB. So you will have to have at least 2 partions for all the data.

If both parties have a Blu-ray drive (and you've got a burner), you could consider burning 2 Blu-rays.

[Doug Jensen]

How do explain the fact that I can plug a 250GB (MS-DOS FAT32) drive into one of my Macs or a PC and see every file on the drive, with no partitioning that I can see?

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Walter Brokx

Disks formatted as FAT32 can be used on both mac and windows without the need of any programs like macdrive. The downside of this kind of partion is that partions have a maximum size of 32 GB. So you will have to have at least 2 partions for all the data.

If both parties have a Blu-ray drive (and you've got a burner), you could consider burning 2 Blu-rays.

The Disk Utility in the Mac OS was built to read FAT32 (windows) partions. This has been the case since OS9. Hence the reason for Doug saying that he has access to the full 250GB on both Mac and PC platforms.

Now NTFS paritions (windows) will require the two different partions you mention or something like macdrive. Cheers!

[Andrew Slankard]

What about if I were to pickup a ~32GB Flash Drive (I may be able to sort through my footage and whittle it down to 32GB or less). They run roughly the same price as a Passport drive but it'd probably be easier to hand off to my client. Anybody know if the compatibility is similar to the Passport?

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Andrew Slankard

What about if I were to pickup a ~32GB Flash Drive (I may be able to sort through my footage and whittle it down to 32GB or less). They run roughly the same price as a Passport drive but it'd probably be easier to hand off to my client. Anybody know if the compatibility is similar to the Passport?

Yes, the Flash drives like SDHC cards are or can be formatted so that both Mac's and PC's can read/write to them. The one major drawback is that 32GB and larger varieties are slow as molasses in January (a Canadian expression) to write and read to.

Time is money, for us and for the customer. In my experience, 16GB Flash or SDHC is as large as I go, for anything larger I use an SSD or harddrive. The best thing is to give 32GB a try to determine if it is workable for your needs, then decide how to proceed. Cheers!

[Gerald Loidl]

I forgot about FAT32 - you guys are right, no additional program is needed to read and write to it on a Mac. But the file size is limited to 4GB IIRC? But the EX1 cant produce any files larger than 4GB as well, so it would not matter if you just want to give them the raw footage.

[Charles Newcomb]

Or, since they've already paid half, you could finish the job and let them make payments on the balance... maybe put a watermark over the footage, just in case?

[Walter Brokx]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

How do explain the fact that I can plug a 250GB (MS-DOS FAT32) drive into one of my Macs or a PC and see every file on the drive, with no partitioning that I can see?

I can....

As far as I remember formatting to FAT32 was limited to partitions of 32GB. But the last time I did format to FAT32 was in 2002, so I could be wrong. But I'm not wrong according to File Allocation Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I did the format on a XP computer and on XP FAT32 formatting is limited to 32GB. On other other systems (except windows 98, 2000 and older) it should be possible to create partions up to 2TB.

[Doug Jensen]

The technical reasons of how/why the drives do what they do doesn't interest me in the least. My point to the original poster is that you can simply buy the drive and use it with both Macs and PCs without doing ANYTHING special. Plug & Play. All files will be visble. No re-formatting is necessary. The USB bus-powered drives are convenient, cheap, reliable, and very easy to use. That's all I need to know about them.

[Damian Heffernan]

Originally Posted by Doug Jensen

The technical reasons of how/why the drives do what they do doesn't interest me in the least. My point to the original poster is that you can simply buy the drive and use it with both Macs and PCs without doing ANYTHING special. Plug & Play. All files will be visble. No re-formatting is necessary. The USB bus-powered drives are convenient, cheap, reliable, and very easy to use. That's all I need to know about them.

Agree 100%. Just buy it. Plug it in and go nuts, Mac or PC.

for the technical, yes there was a 32GB limit per partition and 4GB files size, but only formatting using windows. If you use an after-market program like Acronis Disk Director or countless others you can make the Fat 32 partition as big as you like, thats why you can buy 1TB Fat 32 partitioned drives from the factory.

Fat32 - read/write Mac and PC, 4GB individual file maximum
NTFS - read only Mac, read/write PC

The other point is they're pretty much stuffed with the raw footage anyway as they're not really going to be able to edit EX1 raw footage if they're not skilled/computer savvy. They really just need the footage in a drawer somewhere until they can afford to pay someone to do something right?