Is this the best route?

I have 2 machines:

-Windows Server 2008 r2 x64 file server with 8x1.5TB SATA II drives in RAID 10 on a RocketRaid 4320 controller (gets between 400-800mb/sec sustained)
-Windows 7 Phenom II workstation

The file server hosts uncompressed 720p/1080p footage that I currently have shared and mapped on the Windows 7 workstation.

Would getting a 2gb FC card for each and connecting the two to each other provide a more steady throughput over the 1gb ethernet I have between the two now? And would it be easy to configure?

are you getting 400-800 megabits or megaBytes? If bits then a quality NIC on each end will have enough bandwidth than your array can push out. Are you just streaming the video or copying it back and forth. How fast are your writes on the win7 box?

It's megabytes. I am just streaming it most of the time and then doing the occasional write since most of my time is spent compositing and adding special effects to the footage, which writes the After Effects project file locally to my workstation, which I then commit via SVN when I am done for the day.

I ended up buying 2 4gb FC cards on Tuesday this week, but for the life of me could not get Server 2008 R2 to work as a SAN, nor the Storage Server addon from Technet. The motherboard I have in the file server doesn't do IOMMU, so I can't do the ESXi All-In-One route with pass through.

So at this point I have all of my data backed up to my Backup Server, so I can erase my 6TB RAID 10 array and start over, I just really want to convert the box to SAN so inside Windows 7 on my workstation I can communicate via the FC cards.

I don't know of any FC target software that you could load to do what you want. If you went with 10gbE, you could have run FreeNAS or the Storage server add on to run your win2k8r2 instance as an iscsi target.