FCP to PC delivery hairball: a little help, please?
 

here's what i have:

a client wants a 20 minute video to loop on his widescreen TV (not HD-enabled, SD is fine). because of the location and configuration of the TV, DVD delivery is not an option. this will have to loop through a PC using something called a "Sony player." the video was edited in FCP. the problem seems to be getting it from my computer to theirs.


1) what is the best compression scheme for this? (.avi out from FCP is absolutely horrid...). i probably should have asked this question sooner....

2) their computer has a firewire jack. why won't their PC read my Maxtor 250 GB hard drive? shouldn't this be plug n play?

3) i also have a 4.55 GB NTSC Anamorphic version burned to a dual layer DVD+R (it was refused by the single layer DVD-R format, based on size, which i don't get understand....), but when i try to copy it onto their PC, i get a command that quits just as it is attempting to finish the file (something about refusing "cyclic redundancy"--whatever that means....any ideas?

any help from our local delivery gurus is most welcome. i have been trying to solve this problem for three days, and i'm starting to lose it....

Simple. I take it you dont want to lose any quilaity. Just go to file > Export > Quick Time movie. or goto quicktime converstion and select Mpeg. (i dont know if you have ever exported as a .avi but the quility is rubbish)

on the maxtor question....i'm assuming you have it formatted for Mac, so you'll need to format the drive for Fat32 or NTFS to use it with a PC. i would probably drag the file to the PC desktop before playing it, just incase your firwire might hickup.

Jon Bufkin
http://jonbufkin.com

Meryem, I suspect that Jonathan is right that your hard drive was initialized for Mac only.

But, another possibility is the jumper setting on the pins at the back of the hard drive. There should be a diagram on the label of the hard drive showing the settings for master, slave, CS, neutral, and maybe another one. Sometimes changing those will allow a computer to "see" a hard drive.

Tom: it's an external drive, even though the drive in the case might have those
jumpers you can't get to them (basically), nor would it make any difference.

Yes, a firewire drive is plug and play under Windows (I've got one myself),
as long as there is a filesystem on the drive it understands.

Windows does not understand the Mac file system (it was probably formatted
that way).

If the file stays under 4.5 GB you can put it on a (data) DVD and simply copy
from the DVD onto the harddisk on the playback computer. If you use a dual-
layer DVD you can store 9 GB.

Might be the easiest way. Otherwise you may need to reformat that harddisk
to FAT32 (you loose all data on it!!!), but you are then limited to 4 GB files
on that drive.

You could format it as NTFS, but the Mac can't write to that (only read). So
that won't do you much good.

Final option would be to hook the two computers (or use a laptop inbetween)
through a network...

thank you, guys. the file reads as 4.55 GB and will not store on a 4.7GB single layer disk. i burned it to a dual layer DVD+R, but got that incoherent "cyclic redundancy" command when i tried to copy it onto the PC.

my heroic business partner is outputting it to tape, and is going to input it into a friends' PC and output it to a windows-formatted drive.

i guess we learned a few things about cross-platform limitations....like keep the files smaller....also, investigate the delivery system more carefully before we agree that we can do this...

The hard drives in external cases are normal desktop drives. If they are PATA drives - which most probably still are in retail external drives - they will have jumpers. In my experience the jumper settings can effect external drives. I had a problem once with Windows XP not seeing an external drive. Changing the jumper on the hard drive from CS (Cable Select) to Master solved the problem.

Christopher: I assume this was a homebuilt drive? I know (all) PATA drives
have such jumpers. I'm just saying that if you get a normal external drive
from a store you do not need to change jumpers (you might not even be
able to).

It may have been wrong to say that it wouldn't make any difference. But
yours is the first time I've ever heard of jumper issues in an external drive.

Anyway, I still doubt that was the issue :)

Yes, it was a home built external drive. I would think one wouldn't need to change the jumpers on a store bought external drive, but you never know. There could always be a mistake made at the factory.

The way a mac works is that it can read the format NTFS, but can not read to it. What you need is something called mac drive. Compress you hard drive as a mac formatted drive, unsing disc utlility and then install mac drive on your windows so u can see it. Type mac drive into googe. (this isn't free its $40 but it allows you to see mac formated drives and discs on your windows pc.) i use mac drive all the time. i dont know where i would be with out it. you can also install a day trial just if you need to transfer just a few files.