Hello...I'm in film school and I just got a new desktop pc that I'm going to be running MC 3 on; however, the facilities at my school are all mac based.  Since they have more decks and the ability to capture HD footage, I was wondering is it possible to start a project on one platform and then easily move back and forth between the two, say if I captured my media there, then took it home to edit? 

I've heard that setting up an external drive to read DOS will allow both machines to read it, but it is supposedly less "stable" than formatting for one or the other. 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks

The version of PC format discs that Macs can write to is called FAT32.  This has a maximum file size of 2 GB.  While it can read and write FAT32 discs, Windows XP uses NTFS natively, which doesn't have that 2 GB limit.  How do you get around this issue?  There are a couple of ways. 

If you get yourself a Mac formatted external drive and a copy of MacDrive from Mediafour you'll be able to read from and write to it on your PC.  Then you can copy your media to that drive at school and from it to your PC at home.

Alternatively, if you can install a separate Linux boot on your home PC you can set it up to read and write both Mac and NTFS formatted discs for free.  I have done this in the past with total success.

 Thanks for the quick help. 

And just like MacDrive allows my PC's to read and write HFS+ formatted disks, NTFS for Mac from Paragon makes my Macs read from and write to NTFS formatted disks.

I've never regretted buying both.

The film school may not be too keen on students installing software on their computers, though, Job.

You're right. Just wanted to add the info.

I've also used both Paragon and MacDrive - I think I found that Mac formatted drives with MacDrive were more effective. I think this was because of the difficulties that can arise with weird file ownership and permission in Windows - so when shifting an NTFS drive between Mac and PC I used to find weird file permission issues fairly often.