Writing to CRU with Mac OS

[Liberated Images]

Howdy friends!

I have recently been asked to create DCPs for a film festival and I am being asked to put the DCPs on CRU drives. It looks like they can come preloaded with Linux 3 filesystems. It also claims to be compatible with newer MAC OS (I have the newest OS).

Does anyone have experience writing to CRU? Will I be able to somehow write the DCP to it from my iMac? Just wondering so I can be prepared. My other option if I'm not able to write to that filesystem is to do what I normally do: reformat to NTFS with Tuxera.

And any tips on working with CRU drives would be helpful as well.

All insight is appreciated. Thank you!

[Carsten]

CRU is just a mechanical form factor for a disc cartridge. The external interface can be SATA/eSATA or USB 2.0/USB3.0. For an iMac, you should order a DX115 DC drive container + a CRU USB 'Move Dock' . The DX115 DC carrier will slide into the Movedock which offers a common USB 3.0/2.0 interface towards your iMac. DX115 DC carriers can hold standard 3.5" SATA drives or 2.5" notebook drives or 2.5" SATA SSDs. SSDs are more robust for physical shipping, but offer not much practical speed benefit in typical DCP applications, at least not server side during ingest. You need at least a 250GB SSD for DCP shipping. Only unusually small full length DCPs (or a couple of shorts) may fit onto 120GB SSDs.

https://www.cru-inc.com/products/digita ... -movedock/

https://www.cru-inc.com/products/digita ... by=popular


You can buy a lot of these things second hand on ebay as well. E.g. https://www.ebay.com/itm/403790127485?h ... R5LM_baOYQ

Duplicating companies and cinemas are outphasing CRU slowly because many modern DCI servers do not offer CRU slots anymore. Most of the remaining physical drives that we get nowadays are simple 2.5" USB 3 external drives.
HP used the same DX115 removable drive carrier system on some of their workstations, so, sometimes you find HP branded DX115 offers for very little money as well.


Yes, if you order one of the common optional package of CRU drives, they may come with a common SATA drive preinstalled and preformatted with a Linux ext2/3 file system. A 500GB or 1TB drive has sufficient capacity for multiple full length feature DCPs.

Macs can not write or read Linux ext2/3 file systems natively (nor can Windows). You need a filesystem driver or other tool to write a DCP to such a drive.

On a Mac, your options are - if ext2/3 is strictly necessary for festival policy reasons:

- Paragon extFS (quite common, but, wonky from my experience), a one time purchase license
- Cinematiq DCP Transfer (a monthly or annual license model)
- DCP-o-matic disc writer (free)

Or any combination of these. Some high profile festivals demand CRU drives explicitly - for some, well, sometimes unreflected reasons, I guess. They may have scheduled QC workflows that demand these for best turnaround times.

Technically, NTFS is okay to go. But it must be an NTFS drive no larger than 2TB, and using an MBR partition table, not the default GPT/GUID that all modern OS write per default. MAKE SURE YOU CREATE AN MBR PARTITION TABLE! (easy on a Mac).
Same requirements for Linux ext2/3 drives, by the way.

[Liberated Images]

Excellent information as usual, Carsten and thank you very much. This pretty much lines up with what I was thinking anyway. I typically use USB flash drives or SSDs of 2TB or less formatted to NTFS with an MBR partition scheme using Tuxera. If what you're saying is the case, then that method should be good enough for an indie film showing at a few local theaters and eventually film festivals?

I only plan to use CRU if necessary. Is it possible to get drives that are NTFS or another format that I can change with Tuxera? I will invest in the move dock and the drive container if needed and it'd actually be pretty nice to be able to reformat or just plain have an NTFS/MBR disk that I can move DCPs to if CRU is required in the future.

[Carsten]

You can format them to any type as you like. There is an option to get a complete drive mounted and formatted as ext2/3, as many people lack the capability of creating that specific format by themselves. But it's just an ordinary SATA drive. Max 2TB is a good decision.