So you’re running XP Pro SP2 and some nut job gives you a hard drive with media on it that’s formatted HFS+. XP Pro SP2 will not show the drive on the desktop, but you can see it there in Disk Management, without a letter or path. What do you do? Find a Mac. Now you know your NTFS drives will only read and not write on this Mac. So you cannot copy your files on the HFS+ drive to a NTFS drive. So you go get yourself another drive, a blank one, and hook it to the Mac. Format it FAT32. Then hook the HFS+ drive to the Mac and copy its files to the FAT32 drive. Move the FAT32 drive to the XP Pro SP2 machine. Now you can access the files. If you’re feeling super-cool, copy the files to a NTFS drive.
Sidebar: so some nut job gives you a hard drive with P2 card DVCproHD media on it. The drive has multiple P2 card folders, with one CONTENT folder in the root folder. Your Avid only sees this folder during P2 import. What do you do? You know you cannot have two CONTENT folders in the root folder. So . . . you have to go to all the other CONTENT folders elsewhere on the drive and manually move (yep, it sucks) the contents of all audio, video, voice, icon, and proxy files in their corresponding folders to the same-titled respective folders within the CONTENT folder in the root folder of the drive. Be sure to not mix up your audio and video MXF files. Note that the audio files have “00″, “01″, “02″ and “03″ just before the extension. Now you can point the Avid to the CONTENT folder in the root folder on the drive and all your media will now show up in a bin in your project.
Moral: Digital video tape for acquisition is not yet dead! Real time capture is good time to log, plan, and take notes. No technology will eliminate proper planning from the workflow.
