Say Goodbye to Firewire?

With the rollout of the new MacBook comes the inevitable news that Firewire is dying. The machine is loaded with oodles of new features and many old favorites wrapped in a signature aluminum case. The drag coefficient for this new case must be significantly lower than the old plastic one, and that will be quite handy if I ever leave it on the roof of my car.

The development of this new machine does not herald any new or startling development in the Mac ecosystem, save one. There is no firewire port on the MacBook. And there is no way to add one. You can swap hard drives like you currently swap external drives, and the new track pad reflects the usability of the iPhone and Touch.

But losing the firewire port is a signal that consumers are not going to transfer their video tapes to their machines. No editing, no DVD, no looking back at your old movies when you make that video designed to embarrass your daughter on Prom night. (“Dad! You will NOT show me naked in the tub when I was 18 months old! You will NOT show me tap dancing at the talent show!”)

It is a sure sign that consumers are no longer buying tape-based cameras. Any trip to Circuit City will tell you that. Just try and find a tape-based camera on display. There might be one HDV… two DV. The rest are flash-based or hard drive.

That is fine going forward, but what about our legacy content? What do we do with that? And when the hard drive on our new camera gets full what do we do with the media? I hate tracking and searching file-based content. It is the definition of needle in the haystack. More likely, what happens when that hard drive fails?

I am still struggling with a closet full of legacy content; shelves full of magnetic tape slowly trying to reach a state of stasis. I have Hi8, DV, DVCam, Betamax, VHS, Beta, BetaCam, DigiBeta, DVCPro, D5 and HDCam waiting to get called back into action.

Apple’s decision just reaffirms what I have know all along. Those formats are not coming back into action. In 10 years you will have a very hard time finding a deck that will even play these formats. My kid’s birthdays, my family’s holidays, the business trips and vacations will all be inaccessible.

Truth be told, if you don’t edit your content right after you shoot it, odds are you will never get around to it. The industry knows most of this footage gets shot, viewed once and then forgotten.

Perhaps I need to send a thank-you to Steve Jobs for the wake-up call. This new computer tells me I had better start thinking about how I am going to get my stacks of tape transferred to something I can use. And I need to kiss my firewire dependence goodbye.