Ok…. I am an admitted newbie at editing, but now find myself in a position where I have to get this project done and I am hoping someone here can help me get past, what to me, is a serious stumbling block.

I am running a G5 dualcore 2.3 with 4.5 gigs of RAM, a couple of terabytes of external LaCie 1394a/b drives. I have 43 minutes of 1080i50 footage shot on a Sony HDW-730s on an external 300 gig Maxtor HD. The files on the hard drive are 10 bit uncompressed .mov files and were captured using a Kona2.

I have had no issues encoding in H.264 but try as I might I can’t seem to get the wmv-hd files to look anything remotely like HD content.

I have used flip4mac WMV Studio Pro HD and Cleaner 6.5 and Compressor 2 and can’t seem to get any of these to encode the files in such a way that they are acceptable.

I then tried to encode to avi and switch to my PC (dualcore 3 gig with 2 gigs of RAM) and encode using Microsoft’s Windows Media encoder.

This worked great in small test files but I am attempting to encode 2 to 5 minute segments. When exporting out of FCP 5 or Compressor 2 I get a “file to large” error though I have a dedicated LaCie Bigger Disk (1 Terabyte) for the scratch disk and am saving the encoded files to a separate disk.

Any advice on how to encode wmv-hd from FCP5 or how to encode 100+ gig avi files would be greatly appreciated.

Is your Lacie Bigger drive formatted for mac or Windows. Windows format has a file size limit of 2Gb I think.

Can you turn on file sharing on the mac and access the drive from your PC through the network?

hey Tim...After lurking here for the last couple of weeks I am glad to meet your acquaintance.

The LaCie is formatted for PC as I have been shifting files from the G5 to the PC using the external drives.

I have tried to use the file sharing feature without success. I think it may be because The Sympatico ultra uses dynamic IP's.

My main concern at this point (read deadline overdue) is to export uncompressed avi's from fcp. I am considering setting up striped RAID on the LaCie. DO you think it would help the file size issue?

Welcome to the forum Brent.

The LaCie is formatted for PC as I have been shifting files from the G5 to the PC using the external drives.
Now that we know the drive is PC formatted, is it FAT32 ot NTFS? Either one is probably a bad idea for large files, and it will only transfer data to and from the mac at half the rate it should. You should reformat the drive as HFS+ (MacOS Extended) and use "MacDisk for Windows" to read the drive on the PC. I think you can download a demo of their product before buying. http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3

I have tried to use the file sharing feature without success. I think it may be because The Sympatico ultra uses dynamic IP's.
If both computers are on the same network, Sympatico shouldn't have anything to do with it (firewalls.) However, if the two computers are at different locations, then there will be some ports to open. Dynamic IP isn't too much of a problem because Sympatico only seems to refresh the IP every week or so. It is just a matter of going to http://www.whatismyip.com to find out your outside IP address.