generationfive

Hello,

I work for a non-profit and we make digital stories as part of our public education projects. The digital storytelling center and other trainers we have worked with keep the original files for the stories on their Mac computers (these would be QuickTime files, JPEGS, GIFs, FinalCut Pro, and Adobe Photoshop files). However, all of the computers in our non-profit's office are Windows.

We want to have all of our files in house. There are too many/too large of files to just email them back and forth or keep them on our server. I want to get an external hard drive just for the digital stories, but numerous people have told me that it won't work to write stories from macs onto an external hard drive if you then plan to use the external hard drive with Windows computers. That the external hard drive has to be formatted for one or another operating system and not both.

Is this true? If so it seems to diminish the point of an external hard drive. I don't want to mess up our files, nor can we afford to purchase equipment like this if it's not actually going to do what we need. What we need is in-house access to the stories and files so that I could, for example, use an external DVD burner to make DVDs for events or distribution without having to go through a long process of requesting that from other people who don't work with us but have all our files. Somehow this will involve getting the files from Mac computers to Windows computers, and I was hoping an external hard drive would be the way to do it.

Anyone know anything about this? How should I proceed?

Thank you!

Jesse
(the office's accidental techie)