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Initial Stumbles 

• Shot footage on an EX3 suitable for DVD and web.  Following advice of “gurus” such as Alister Chapman, shot it in 720p50 mode.  Having done so, wanted to get it into Final Cut for editing etc.
• Initially, used ClipBrowser (v2.0) to ingest the footage.  Didn’t know if I should do it the same way I did on Windows for Sony Vegas, that is by generating a “.mxf” file or by generating a “.mov” file.  Tried both.  These are containers, not codecs.  The “.mxf” file is Material Exchange Format while “.mov” is QuickTime.
• Wanted to know more about the contents e.g. the codecs used and their settings.  To get this, used VideoSpec - a video analyzer broadly like GSpot on Windows)
• MXF contents: FourCC “mpg2″ (MPEG-2), Bitrate 35000 kbps,  fps 50, 1280×720, PAR 1:1, DAR: 16:9, Chroma subsampling format YUV420p.
• MOV contents: FourCC “xdva” (XDCAM), Bitrate 34900 kbps, fps 50, 1280×720, PAR 1:1, DAR 16:9, Chroma YUV420p.
• In FCP, tried to find a standard setting suitable for this, but nothing matched. In particular there were 60p formats but not 50p formats - frustrating.   Instead made a “best guess” at the most closely matching format and customized it.  I think I ended up with format “HDV 720p50″ but was concerned that HDV may have different standards (e.g. number and aspect ratio of pixels) to that of my EX XDCAM footage.

This is now a usable system.

However, for education and possible flexibility, I next intend to identify benchmark tests for both Mac and Windows, run them as-is on standard disks, GRAID and ProAVIO RAID, attempt install MacDrive (via workaround to dodge RAID driver compatibility issues), retest, also try other cross-filesystem tools. Also, for the ProAVIO NTFS partition, want to identify a reliable filesystem synchronizer. ABSynch comes to mind but I have not used it before.

The result was exactly as intended, an MBR partitioning system containing an HFS+ partition and an NTFS partition. Mac OS X was able to read the contents of both partitions. Windows (BootCamp XP) was able to read and write to the NTFS partition.

Now the question is: Can I non-destructively convert the RAID’s partitioning system from GPT to MBR? Non destructively here means I don’t have to wipe the disk (through reformatting etc) and recover the data from backup. The answer is YES! The Mac-based iPartition app does exactly that.

iPartition 3.1.1 (154) did it fine, taking around 6 or 7 hours.

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OK so I have partitions for HFS+ and NTFS but still no extra disk (drive letter) shows up.  XP’s Disk Management tool does list the disk device but allows no operations on it - menu commands are greyed-out.  The tool displays the partitioning system as GPT, which may be a clue:  I think XP is unable to handle GPT-based partitions, only MBR ones.

Used iPartition (3.1.0, 153)  to split the existing RAID into separate volumes for the existing HFS+ volume and additionally an NTFS volume, the latter for use by the BootCamp-XP system. (more…)

WinClone worked fine once the BootCamp system disk size had been reduced from 250 GB to 30GB and de-fragged. (more…)

Backed-up to my new RAID1 USB drive:

• Backed-up Mac volume to “Macintosh HD 2009-04-21.dmg”. Presumably I did this via Disk Utility from bootable CD.
• Tried backing-up XP volume by using WinClone. Normally a smooth process but this time I ran into difficulties.

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The “separate partitions” workaround should be simple to try and will provide a basis for a baseline speed test against which to compare the other workarounds.  iPartition can be run not only from its own bootable CD but also from Mac OS. Only under the latter can it see the RAID. Before doing anything though, back-up the system disks, Mac and Win (BootCamp-XP).

Regardless of which product is to blame, what work-arounds are there?

1. Split the RAID into separate partitions for Windows and for Mac filesystems.
2. Alternative RAID card e.g. by Promise Technology.
3. Convert the filesystem itself between Windows and Mac formats, by using iPartition (which I already have).

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