Working on bigger projects with people in remote places always is a hassle. Today¹ I received the long anticipated hard disk with the blue screen shots I should be working on. I popped it into the USB port but Windows thought the device was damaged and suggested to replace it. Luckily I remembered that the person who sent me the disk was a Mac user so I tried connecting the device on some Mac and it worked. Then my data-odyssey began…

I was plotting and scheming how I could convert a HFS+ file system into a platform friendly FAT32 but the easiest way is usually the one which takes you the longest. I copied every single file to the Mac’s hard drive, reformatted the disk to FAT32 and currently I am waiting as the files are transferred back onto the external hard drive.

Effectively this whole process ate up about one hour of my time. One hour I could have been working on the data instead of moving it around. But it wasn’t over already.

I remember requesting the files as, quote, “MXF files, straight from the P2 card” from my source but I haven’t paid attention to the fact that I won’t be supplied with dailies rather than excerpts from an edit. So I got the strangest files I’ve encountered so far: MXF.DV-QuickTimes that won’t play back on my PC - thanks to DVCPRO-HD compression. I strolled the web to get hold of the codec for QuickTime. To cut a long story short: For Windows users there aren’t any. So I spent the rest of the evening in the lab on a Mac with Final Cut Pro installed which read and played back the files no problemo re-encoding and reading some gaming magazine.

So it was recoding time - from HDVCPRO HD to QuickTime JPEG with about twice the file size that made me fondly remember the days back when I purchased my notebook — when 40 gigs meant a real big hard drive.

And now?

Now I’m reformatting the QuickTime files to TIF image sequences because Nuke doesn’t like JPEG QuickTime files. Time lost today: About 7.5 hrs — and counting.

What I have learned today:

• That sometimes it’s the cable, not the device.
• That you can access a Mac’s Disk Manager under Applications > Utilities.
• That this Mac can read NTFS disks — but not move data onto them.
• That I really can’t stand a Mac mouse’s acceleration and behavior.
• That there’s no way to read a DVCPRO HD QuickTime file on a PC.
• That a Mac has to have Final Cut Pro installed to play back a DVCPRO HD QuickTime file.
• That QuickTime exports the video files in the resolution currently displayed.
• That JPEG-QuickTimes (maximum quality) are twice as big as eqivalent DVCPRO HD QuickTime files.
• That Nuke doesn’t like QuickTimes with JPEG compression.
• That I should communicate better what files I need in what format and on what file system.

1. Well, in fact yesterday now [back]