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.

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,Apple,video,filmmaking,firewire,Macbook,DV,tape

It was shot with a still camera…

The line between still and video cameras continues to blur. True, that’s a painful pun, but there is no denying this trend is most evident in top-of-the-line still cameras. If we could look at the names on the waiting list for the Canon 5D Mark II professional S.L.R. I would wager most of them would belong to filmmakers, not still photographers.

This is because the high definition footage from the Canon is mind blowing. It is full motion, 30 frame-per-second, 1080p footage captured on an image sensor the size of a 35mm negative, instead of the video camera’s fingernail sized CCD. Not only is the capture system vastly superior with the S.L.R., but the glass in the lens means the image in the $2,700 camera rivals that of a $100,000 HD camera used for features. Using Canon’s interchangeable lenses means the filmmaker is no longer limited to a zoom lens full of compromises permanently mounted to the camera. You now have a prime lens system with out Redrock. And you have a digital cinema solution without the hype of Red and their proprietary file format hassles.  You have a filmmakers Nirvana. You also have a very long waiting list.

There have even been a few rumors of late that Red pulled their plans to release Scarlet because the 5DM2 chopped the legs out from under it. Honestly, that would not surprise me.

Sure there are compromises. There is no audio to speak of so you are back to double system sound. But heck, I could figure that out using an iPhone or a DVcam.

The Web was buzzing a couple of weeks ago when photographer Vincent LaForet spent a weekend making a short, wordless movie using an early Canon 5D Mark II. He hired a couple of models, grabbed a crew, rented a helicopter, pulled together $5,000, and made an absolutely astonishing-looking piece of video. It was hard to find the thing online—Vincent didn’t want to host it on his own site because of the massive bandwidth required to serve it. (Here’s his writeup, and here’s the “making of” video.)

Finally, David Pogue of the New York Times writes that, “the original video has finally found a place online, and you should have a look.” I could not agree more, you should have a look. And as Pogue writes,  “Just keep telling yourself: ‘It was shot with a still camera. It was shot with a still camera….’”

LaForet | Visuals (in HD)

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,Canon 5D Mark II,video,filmmaking,still camera,HD,1080p,LaForet