Work Between PC and Mac?

[Josh Kahane]

Hi

I have a PC which I game on and record footage from there. However, my mac is my main computer (everything but games is done here) and copy GBs of video files across to my Mac is simply to time consuming to make an edit (I use FCP to edit).

Does anyone have any good work flows or ideas of how to have easy file transfer between Mac and PC? My Mac needs to of course access these video files from my PC fast enough to edit them.

Hope you can help, thanks.

[res1233]

If your PC has a spare PCI-E slot, you could add firewire and could store your media on a FireWire drive and just move the drive between computers as needed, assuming your PC doesn't have firewire already (which is likely, unfortunately).

[Sjhonny]

I'd get a NAS (maybe raid?) with netatalk (afp implementation for linux) on it and hook it up to a wired network.

[Hillskill]

I have my iMac and Win7 machine networked. I can transfer files between them by simply dragging and dropping. Over Cat5e I get 100MB/s which is pretty fast IMHO. Unless your talking 100s of GBs its fine. To swap a firewire or eSATA drive between OSX and Win7 you would need to have either MacDrive or Paragons installed on the relevant machines, not ideal and you may find you have occasional stability issues. My advice would be to network them.

[Consultant]

Use Gigabit ethernet.

[MisterMe]

Originally Posted by Hillskill

... you would need to have either MacDrive or Paragons installed on the relevant machines, not ideal ...

Huh?! Network communications have their own advantages, but they do not in any way detract from the usefulness of having an NTFS driver installed on your Mac. I use the free NTFS-3G rather than the commercial Paragon NTFS. However, Paragon NTFS is the best NTFS driver available for the Mac. It allows me to minimize my use of FAT32. Please, no more FUD.