done the hard bit the wonder of the internet got me a power lead for our old video camera – have a load of MiniDV home videos want to convert to digital and edit down to some movies for kids to keep

? so I’m not really mac orientated but best thing in house to video edit is my daughters macbook pro- bought an external drive to save the original unedited vids to – now these will be big files – normally I’d format the drive FAT32 so both windows and mac can read/write but these files I reckon will typically be 8-10GB too big so what to format the drive to? OS NTFS? paid for NTFS? so can access with wiindows or just run with macOS?

not at all familiar with the video editing that come with a Mac but looks similar to others – don’t want to do anything fancy or pro
but any ideas on what format to save edited vids to? – for still being able to view in 10years time was thinking something like MP4 as so much stuff around in that format?

not sure what save options mac offers but also got wondershare converter installed which seems to cover a lot of formats

thanks or point me to a thread or article please

In 10 years the disc will probably be dead 🙂 So you have a choice as to weather you keep all the raw footage or just keep the edited down versions.

Just seen that NTFS isn’t properly compatible with MAC (read but no write), it would be my choice due to the potentially larger file sizes. So I guess your stuck with a Mac format if you want to go that route, what are your other options for video editing, PC’s are just as capable these days.

As for output formats you have a few choices, players seem to get more compatible rather than less these days and you can haul most stuff through converters if needed. Once you start compressing your outputs to be a sensible size then you can’t go back, unless you go back to your original footage.

A good google around the software name and output options is normally a good start. Exporting as high quality as you can makes sense but if you imagine 10 years time it may all look like cine/vhs does now in comparison 🙂

Format your disc as ExFAT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

Read/writeable by Mac an Windows and allows large file sizes.

Format the video in the highest resolution you possibly can, that’s about all you can do. MP4 is fine, it’s just a container, there’ll be means of converting it to newer formats in the future. We archive the raw footage pre-editing as well. iMovie on the Mac will do the job nicely for editing.

ExFat looks good – cheers was going to save the raw footage and assume that would be able to save from external hard drive to some sort of SSD at reasonable cost in near future (if I remember) – not expecting drive to survive very long – hope to be able to keep some edited versions in a format that does survive – prompted by niece asking for family pics which sadly I just don’t have – would like my kids to have access to stuff from their childhood rather than it get thrown in skip

You can get a wedge to read/write NTFS on Mac, but I’d used MacOS Extended to write the files too and work with, and get a whatever-formatted drive if you want to ship the files out somewhere.
You can equally get extensions for Windows computers to read mac disks, but I’m of an opinion of using the OS preferred filesystem is the best bet to avoid corruption, particularly of larger files you are worknig on and saving/resaving.. but exFAT is your best cross platform option.