A Tale of Two Platforms:
Converting From FCP to Premier Pro
by
Jeremy Hanke
Five years ago, I shot my first feature and edited it on an FCP4.5 G4. As new software improvements have come out and I’ve switched to a Premiere Pro PC as my main editing platform, I decided that I would like to re-dabble with my first film and make an improved version of it. (I think this obsession among filmmakers to try to improve their past films for “ultimate” completion is why director Peter Jackson is quoted as saying, “Films are never completed. They are simply abandoned.”) A number of the problems that I couldn’t overcome five years ago have seen plugins, improvements, and the increase in my own personal knowledge to decrease the complications in dealing with them today.
To actually transfer a film that takes up the better part of a terabyte of hard drive space from Mac to PC is a chore in and of itself. To begin with, I decided that I needed to create a portable hard drive system that would let me bear the brunt of this labor. Building your own portable hard drives is a complex process, because most of the enclosures you can buy do not have adequate ventilation. (I learned this the hard way after losing my entire second film when the poorly ventilated portable hard drive I had built finally overheated and fried. Of course, Murphy’s law was in full effect, as the hard drive on to which I had transferred the only uncompressed version of the film crashed at virtually the same time.) As such, it’s important to figure out a way to get the necessary air circulating around your hard drives.
The way I came up with was to buy some Lian-Li RH68 mobile racks and the RH58 hard drive caddies that fit them, which have two fans in the front. They are designed to slide into a special drive that fits into the 5 ¼” bay in a desktop.
As I wanted a portable drive, I fit the special drive into a 5 ¼” opening portable CD-ROM enclosure instead. I chose the Vantec NexStar 2Enclosure because they have both firewire and USB 2.0 ports, which is helpful since Macs tend to prefer firewire and PCs tend to prefer USB 2.0. The Vantec Drive was a little too short for the special drive, but a few minor drill holes inside the case allowed it to screw in properly. (You can see from the picture that the drive extends a little far from the enclosure, but this is a pretty minor cosmetic issue.) The Vantec drive’s also have a rear fan, which provides additional circulation, however, it may yield unacceptably high noise. I built two of these portable drives, and one of them had a fairly quiet fan, while the other had a very loud found. As the extra fan is unnecessary, we disconnected the power to it on the loud drive by removing the power wire that runs to it at the rear of the drive.
I made sure that I got some hard drives that were ATA as opposed to SATA, as the portable drives do not support SATA to my knowledge. I got 4 250 Gig Hitachi hard drives with caddies for each of them. Once I got everything shipped to me, I constructed the drives and found that they worked quite well and circulated enough air to keep the drives extremely cool and safe.
The next step was how to format the drives. Because Macs can read and write to smaller Windows FAT32 drives (like those used in thumb drives), I thought that if I formatted them into the Windows NTFS format that they would be able to read those, as well. Unfortunately, while the Mac will read Windows NTFS discs, it can’t write to them. My next thought was to format the drive to Windows FAT32, but that was a problem because Windows FAT32 drives can’t have files that are larger than 2 Gigs. When you’re transferring a lot of video from Mac to PC, you can easily get into situations that a file is over 2 Gigs.
