ext. hd used by both mac and PC?

[Josh Miller]

I'm using an '08 Mac Pro do do my editing in the premiere suite but when I need to render out an animation in cinema 4d it becomes impossible for me to work productively due to the slow down caused by the processing in c4d. I sometimes need to edit something while the animation is rendering in the background. I'm maxed on RAM. Who knows when the new Mac Pros will (if ever) be out next. I'm thinking of building a PC just for animation. Is there a server-type external drive solution I can use so that I can plug both the mac and pc in to edit the files on there with the mac but render out the animations from the pc to the hard drive?

[Brian Iannone]

You can build/buy an NAS disk or a complete server if you'd like. The data would be on your network and accessible from both Macs and PCs. But that seems a little much for what you're trying to do.

You could just buy a single HDD and format it in either FAT32 (not recommended due to the 4GB file limit) or exFAT. exFAT is read by both Mac OS X and Windows. Plug it into the Mac, edit, then plug it into the PC and render.

[Stephen Lovett]

Hi,

There are utilities for both platforms that allow them to recognize and read/write to the other platforms file structure.

Specifically, NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software, and MacDrive from Media four. There pretty inexpensive and both have worked for me for years. Hope this helps.

Steve