A long-time cross-platform question...
 

I've been running a networked Mac/PC system for a number of years, and there's one issue I've never had resolved.

I do most of my editing on the Mac side with FCP. I'd like to be able to take the footage over the the PC side for some additional processing but, when I export the FCP edits as a Quicktime or AVI using the Mac's native DV/DVCPRO - NTSC codec, the results on the PC side are awful-looking. Even if exported at maximum quality, the footage comes across on the PC side as blurry and low-res.

Is this the result of some sort of incompatibility between Apple's and Microsoft's DV codecs? Is there any way around this while remaining in the DV codec? If not, what would be the best codec to use while transferring? (I'm currently using Photo-JPEG.) Or is it just something I'm doing wrong?

I guess I'm still puzzled why a DV-codec Quicktime or AVI from the Mac won't work well on the PC...

IIRC, the QT DV codec encodes at half-resolution by default. Somewhere in the QT settings you can change it.

O.K., this is fairly weird...the encoding isn't the problem - I'm already doing it at highest quality. There is a switch in the Quicktime Player preferences for using "high quality movie mode" -- when I select it on the Mac player, the results are great. However, when I do the same with the PC's QT Player, I only get the upper left quarter of the image displaying, with black covering the rest of the frame. Granted, that upper left corner is in high quality, but somehow that's not what I expected...