Thanks for the help, Spot! I'm a little confused though, what is NTFS? If I do this, do you mean both my PC and the Mac will be able to use the drive?

NTFS is the standard file system used on PCs from Win2K onwards.
I didn't think Macs could mount NTFS drives! This might be something new in OSX, they certainly weren't able to which is why things like Firestore used FAT32 drives.
Anyway even if your friends Mac cannot cope with NTFS volumes there's a quite cheap ($50) utility called MacDrive that'll let you mount a HFS volume on a PC so no drama either way.

I've been working with DB footage we had shot and I even downconverted by our J30 to DV25 it looks stunning. I did a quick DVD of it in Vegas for a client preview and played back on our home DVD player going RGB to the TV it looks better than most on air material and we're receiving via DVB. To be frank I cannot see anything in it that really needs CC! After this experience I think DV25 is capable of much better results than most of us realise.
Bear in mind that to deal with 10bit 4:2:2 you are working at higher data rates. Nothing over the top, SATA RAID 0 is quite adequate.

OSX can read NTFS partitions but not write to them. When it comes to mac/pc drive compatibility FAT32 is the only way to go...

I write regularly from my Powerbook to an NTFS formatted drive using OSX.
[edit] forgot to mention that you can also transfer over a network as well, particularly if you have a gigabit net.

This is strange, I have 3 portable drives formatted in NTFS and can't write on them with any of the macs at University that run 10.3.8.

Perhaps DSE has some additional driver loaded on his Mac?

To the best of my knowledge, when Apple introduced NTFS support in OSX it was in read-only mode like the linux driver. They may have updated it but it still doesn't work for me.

Nope. Nothing additional. In working on the FCP book, I regularly dropped my NTFS formatted drive on my PC, created QT files from Vegas, stored them on the NTFS drive, then opened in FCP. Were it that I had my Powerbook w/me here in NYC, I'd do it here, because I'vegot that drive with me now. It works just fine. I couldn't do this with OS9, but with OSX, not a problem.

But were you able to write data on the drive or just read form it ?

Right, it sounds like you can get the Mac to read files on NTFS drives, but I need it to write to that drive. Once it's on that drive, I just need to get get the PC to recognize it so I can transfer it to another drive on the PC.
I doubt I have gigabit network capability. Bought my computer late summer 2002 and if it's my ethernet card we're talking about, I believe it's 10/100. I take it that would slow things down substantially.

I guess the easiest solution would be to format the drive as FAT32, you'll be sure it'll work between the mac and the PC.

Forgot, you can also network the mac and the PC using a firewire cable which will be faster than a 10/100 connection. I do this everyday at university, works very well.

Firewire? Really? Now that sounds more like it. How would I go about doing that?

You can do that BUT you need the Mac and the PC in pretty close proximity.

Surely the answer is SO simple. Let the Mac guy format the drive as a standard Mac HFS+ volume, put the files onto the drive and then using Macdrive mount the drive onto your system and copy the files over to a NTFS volume, job done. If you can get the Mac and your PC on the same network then copy the files over the network. Yes at 100Mb it's going to take a while but so what, let it run overnight.

You are after all going to face much bigger problems down the track. Once you get the 10 bit 4:2:2 video you're going to need fast drives to get any sort of performance, forget firewire drives unless they're a RAID 0 SATA box, preferably on firewire 800.

Yes I know you can squirt 10 bit uncompressed quite happily down firewire 400 BUT that's only one stream. Once you start cutting video or adding extra tracks etc you're effectively needing to put more data down the pipe.

Bob.

Nat: Can you provide some detail on pc/mac networking via firewire? I couldn't get that work and and am thinking you need something like Unibrain Firenet.

Sure. This is built in both OSes, you don't need anyting additional.

The tricky part is on the Mac, In the system preferences go to network. The second field at the top is labeled "Show : " By default it should be set at "Netowork Status". Click it and choose "Network port configurations". Click "New" at the bottom. Give the connection a name and choose "Internal firewire". Now in the Show field choose the connection you just created. In the configure field you can choose Manual. I always use a fixed IP adress as it's more simple. choose something like "192.168.20.1"
You will need to turn on "Windows file sharing" in the Sharing section of the system preferences.

On the PC side, in Network connections in the control panel you will find a 1394 network adapter. Go in it's properties, choose the TCP/IP Item, click properties and change the IP adress to a fixed one "192.168.20.2"

You can try connecting to the mac from the PC by typing this is the adress bar :
\\192.168.20.1\usernameonthemac

From the mac go in the "Go" menu in the finder, choose connect to server. Type smb://192.168.20.2

Feel free to mail me if you have any questions about this.

Nat

Thanks Nat! that works. I did seem to have some difficulty when both ethernet and firewire connections were visible. Probably operator malfunction, but the connedtion seemed to end up on the ethernet route. But I seemed to have stumbled onto the right path.

On the PC side, I navigated with explorer to the MAC (w/o ethernet connection) and mounted as a network drive.