[bonniescotland]

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question.
I have a Mac and my friend has a PC we both have Adobe Premiere and wish to share the video editing of some digital video we have.
Is this possible?
What would be the best way of doing this.

Is it possible for either of us to buy an external portable hard drive, save our Premiere edit on this external drive then hook the external drive up to the other person's computer and finish off the edit on the other person's computer. Will the external hard drive be compatible with both Mac and PCs (any ideas what brand, particularly interested in Iomega's Peerless), and also will there be problems going from Premiere for Mac to Premiere for PC.

I know we could possibly solve the problem by simply transferring our edit back to Mini DV tape and import it to the other person's computer via digital camcorder, but I have been told that transferring your edit back to DV and then trying to edit it again will cause problems. Not quite sure what all these problems would be, but I do now that one problem will be that all the audio channels will merge into one when transferred back to tape, therefore audio will be difficult to re edit.

Hope this message makes sense, I am new to all this, so please forgive me if it doesnt.
Thanks

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Hi,
What you're trying to do absolutly is possible, I do it everyday. One of the great things about Premiere (version 6 and higher) is that it's cross-platform between Macs and PC.

There are several ways you can share the project easily between platforms. But there are a few things that must be done to prepare the files.

First, if you're using an external hard drive and want to transfer the video files, format the HD in MS-DOS format. For best results on the Mac, I'd format the drive WITH the Mac using Apple's disk utilities. MS-DOS will be a choice so long as the drive isn't already Mac formatted.

Otherwise, you can use a Mac formatted drive and a utility such as MacDrive on the PC.

One problem with using files created on your Mac as source on the PC, may be that the Mac won't have added the needed file-name extensions. (Do yourself a favor on the PC and make filename extensions viewable under -any folder- view/folder options- uncheck hide file extensions.)

If the source files are from the Mac, chances are they are Quicktime files and need to be named: Filename.mov

If the files are from the PC, they should already be named: filename.avi

Either file type will work fine on either system and contain all DV information, just that they must have the file extensions on both platforms.

Premiere project files are cross-platform which should make your life easier. Again, the project files created on the Mac must be called: filename.ppj to be read on the PC.

(Leave off any of these extensions, and the PC and Premiere on the PC will just treat these files as useless documents until they are added).

Basically, just transfer your project.ppj files and source video files (with proper file extensions) over from the Mac to the PC. You will have to do a lot of pointing the Premiere project toward the source file locations on the opposite platform, which can take a long time, depending on the number of source clips. This process can get really tedious in a cross-platform situation where you have had to add file extensions and therefore changed the actual filenames. The project won't recognize a file called filename001 as filename001.mov until you direct it to it. For a large number of source files, this can get tedious, but once done and the project saved, you're off and running.

To avoid this from the start when I do cross-platform work, I add the file exts to my Mac projects to begin with, and build projects ONLY once the files are cross-platform ready.

Another method you can use, if you don't have access to an external drive, but you do have the source DV tapes and the PC has firewire, is just transfer the project.ppj file from Mac to PC, open the file in Premiere on the PC and choose OFFLINE for all the source clips. You can then rebuild the batch-capture list and recapture the source-clips on the PC -since all the relevant IN and OUT point information is actually contained within the offline information on the project timeline, even without the souce clips.

Unfortunatly, the actual batch-capture files are NOT cross-platform from Mac to PC (which would make this process even simpler) but recapturing from an offline timeline is fairly straightforward.

Hope any of this helps! Good luck!