mac switcher - external hard drive

hey hope someone can help me, here's my problem.

i'm a windows user hoping to get my macbook pro a in a few weeks, once i have it i plan to buy an external storage device to put videos, pictures, and large audio files for editing. however, i also need to be able to use it with a windows and mac os x, and some of my files may be larger than 4.5GB which means i can't use fat32, is there another file system that i can use which will be supported by mac and windows?

cheers.

well, if you're willing to pony up the cash for a third party app for windows, you could format it in HFS+ and use this to access it in windows:

mac drive

or you could format your external drive ntfs and use macfuse and ntfs3g on your mac side to access the ntfs partition (OS X reads ntfs natively but cannot write to ntfs volumes)
another product that enables os x to write on ntfs drives is paragon ntfs for mac.