As an offline editor, I make great use of Apple’s Firewire technology. I use firewire to get from my DVCam deck to the CPU or to my Avid Mojo. Then there are all of those firewire drives I have and all of the ones that myself and my clients use to shuttle projects and footage around. Today DV Guru linked to an article at IT Business Net that talks about firewire and its future. It paints a pretty bright picture. I truly hope that firewire will continue to get better and faster as the old SCSI days of ID numbers and termination are happily left behind, but I have to question that exact picture painted int he article, if only from real world experience. A year and a half (or so) ago I walked into my local Comp USA and they had a nice assortment of firewire drives and several firewire 800 drives. I walked in last week and they had very few firewire drives at all and only one 800 … which they had to locate via computer. It was in the back. As for cables, they only had a few 6 pin to 6 pin and no 800 cables. For fun I looked at Circuit City and they only had 2 6 pin to 4 pins. Not that they sell much of anything that is 6 pin compatible anyway. Apple has removed firewire from the current iPods. The only Macbook with a firewire 800 port is the 17 inch. But that being said there are two firewire ports on my cable box but according to the yahoo-cable rep they are non-functioning!
So who really knows what the future of firewire holds. USB 2.0 has taken a large part of the market and we all know that firewire has never been super accepted in the Windows PC world anyway. It is a standard for transferring data from consumer mini-DV cameras and a lot of prosumer and professional cameras have the option as well. And the professional audio world has embraced the technology. If you work in this business and rely on firewire as much as I do then the All FireWired Up article is a good read.