Martin,
Several labs here at UW have had similar problems in performing
ftp transfers of Bio-Rad .pic files from PC to Mac, and even PC to PC.
Files are often corrupted, especially multi-image .pic. Converting to .tif
allows about 2/3 of the files to be successfully transferred.  This occurs
regardless whether it is a direct ftp from desktop to desktop or if they
are routed through Unix servers.  I now suspect there is something to do
with the ethernet system in use on our campus.  Until the problem can
be tracked down our workaround is using PKZip to compress the .pic
files at
the confocal, then performing binary ftp, and unzipping the files on the Mac
using ZipIt.  ZipIt is a PKZip compatible zip utility for the Mac. Both
compression utilities are fairly fast so it's not too painful.
 
 
Glen MacDonald
   Research Scientist
Hearing Research Laboratories of the
Virginia Merrill Bloedel Hearing Research Center
Box 35-7923
University of Washington
Seattle, WA  98195-7923
(206) 616-4156
[log in to unmask]
 
 
 On Sat, 24 Feb 1996,
Martin W. Wessendorf wrote:
 
> In message  <[log in to unmask]>
> Confocal Microscopy List writes:
> > Try 4D Turnaround from the Integrated Miscroscopy Resource at the
> > Universtiy of Wisconsin.  It will turn BioRad .pic files into QT movies.
> > Charles Thomas did a good job....
>
> I tried the program and it worked wonderfully...eventually.
>
> The problems I've been having were apparently related to neither the programs
> nor the dataset.  Rather, it was how I was down-loading the data.  I have a
> partition on a large, shared drive (under a Sun), onto which I save my datasets.
> I can access the datasets from my PowerMac via Appleshare am able to view them
> directly off the net, using NIH-Image.  However, neither 4D Turnaround nor any
> other program that I tried was able to convert the the datasets to a Quicktime
> movie.  After much fumbling, I the light finally dawned that it might be a
> networking problem.  I ftp'd the dataset to the hard drive on my Mac (using
> Fetch) and things worked perfectly.
>
> I expect that the problem relates to accessing a DOS file on a Unix drive using
> Appleshare.  Anyone out there have similar experiences--especially if they've
> found solutions?
>
> Thanks in advance--
>
> Martin Wessendorf
> University of Minnesota
>