A FilmHelp article by Greg Pak
I recently bought my first new desktop in eight years and upgraded to Final Cut Pro 7 to edit my new short film “Mister Green.” I’ll be posting much more about “Mister Green” soon. But for now, here’s a painfully detailed report on the trials and travails of transferring a much older film project to the new workstation. Here’s hoping it helps someone out there avoid my mistakes.
Transferring the Media
The older project had files scattered across multiple drives on an old blue and white G3 desktop. Unfortunately, out of the box, the G3 and my new 2.66 GHz Pro Mac don’t communicate particularly well. The new Mac only has Firewire 800 ports; the old Mac only has Firewire 400 ports. A cheap adapter would let me plug Firewire 400 devices into the new Mac. But my dream of transferring directly from the old computer to the new computer using Target Disk Mode didn’t work out — the blue and white G3s apparently don’t work as target computers. Although, strangely enough, two of the drives on the B&W did show up when I connected it via Firewire to the new computer. (Your guess is a good as mine!) But for the bulk of the media, I had to transfer the data onto Firewire drives, then transfer it again from the Firewire drives to the new Mac.
Even that relatively straightforward process became a bit complicated when I discovered that my newest Firewire drives wouldn’t open on the old Mac — they’d been formatted to be bootable with Intel Macs, which means they don’t show up on old Macs running less than OS 10.4. So I used some older Firewire drives, which were a bit touchy and crashed once or twice.

Continue reading →