I've
recently been working on a project for an upcoming issue
of the magazine to create hot-swappable hard drives for
media production that could be swapped between PC and
Mac. Of course, I quickly discovered that, although Mac
will read PC drives, they won't write to the NTFS standard
that is currently used by PC hard drives. PCs, on the
other hand, won't even try to read a Mac drive and will
just ignore it or try to re-format it. (Oddly enough,
I have two cats at home that behave very similarly to
one another, but that's a story for another time and a
far different article!)
At
first I thought the smart money was on converting the
Mac to write to PC disks, but I quickly discovered that
was a no-go. Luckily for me, the good folks at Mediafour
went about the process from the opposite angle and had
complete success. They made a program that allowed your
PC to read any Mac disc and write to it appropriately.
When I heard about this clever device, I knew that I needed
to do a review of it for my fellow microfilmmakers, who
might easily desire an easy way to shuttle information
back and forth between Mac and PC, much as I did.
With
that said, let's break this little program down and see
how it faired.
Ease
of Use
I don't think I've run into a software package that is
this easy to use and is this issue-free. Basically, install
it in your computer once and completely forget about it
unless you want to format a hard drive or create a DVD
for a Mac.
Depth
of Options
The options are simple and complete: to read Mac discs,
hard drives, CDs, and other media on a PC, to format PC
hard drives, CDs, and other Media for Mac, and to basically
allow a completely seamless work experience between both
platforms.
Despite
the fact that this isn't a laundery list of abilities,
this is quite sufficient for my taste. The fact that I
can edit an entire program on Premiere Pro 2, export
it to my external Mac Drive, and take it to my Mac to
burn the project to a DVD is awesome. There are many times
where it's so much simpler to be able to do part of your
work on one machine and transition to another machine
to finish it off, especially if one machine is at work
and the other machine is at home!
