David Pogue is bummed that Apple is no longer worrying about owners of tape camcorders.
In the days of olde iMovie, you could export the results back to your tape camcorder. You’d preserve 100 percent quality, you’d free up the space on your hard drive, ready for the next editing project, and you’d have a simple way to play the movies on your HDTV.
Apple, however, is convinced that tape camcorders are dead, and it seems determined to pound nails into that coffin. The company expects you to store all of your video, now and forever, on hard drives.
It’s easy to see why Pogue is upset. Soon, his tapes will be stranded and uneditable. He even vented his unhappiness to Steve Jobs himself a while back.
I must admit, [Jobs] gave me quite a wakeup call. He pointed out that in 10 years, there won’t be any machines left that can play them.
(He also mentioned that, realistically, the only time people really edit their movies is just after they’ve shot them. And sure enough: I’ve been intending to edit my tapes for 15 years now; what makes me think I’ll have time to do it in the next 15?)
Mac and video fans may not like it—especially the part about having to buy a new, tapeless camcorder—but the writing is on the wall. Tape is dead; camcorder manufacturers have been saying as much for years now. And Apple is not about to preserve some legacy jack just for the sake of the dwindling MiniDV cult.
It’s interesting to see this sort of public tug of war over a feature. Pogue knows what he wants and he’s upset Apple is taking it away from him. But Jobs has a point too: Tape is dying. As a company, Apple has to move toward things that show signs of life. That may upset some customers, but it’s still the right move for Apple.
Reminds me of way back when Apple stopped including floppy drives on Macs. People were upset then too. But does anyone look back now and think Apple messed up there?
Matthew P
on 13 Feb 09In the first linked article where he is reviewing iMovie ‘09, he’s more concerned with not having a suitable replacement for tapes available at this point in time. As he mentions, if our Macs had Blu-Ray drives, there wouldn’t be a problem.
I think the greater issue is that we haven’t yet reached the perfect digital solution to high-quality storage, Blu-Ray or otherwise, owing to various problems (being unaffordable, companies like Apple having to license the tech, etc).
Hisham Abboud
on 13 Feb 09Apple has always been at the forefront of adding and dropping features ahead of others, e.g. introducing the 3.5” drive when 5.25” still ruled, then dropping the same 3.5” for the CD-ROM.
Jake
on 13 Feb 09I remember when Apple put 100MB IoMega Zip drives on all their Powers Macs, that was pretty forward thinking too, right? Nothing like a storage media that goes completely unsupported after 4 years.
Nate Klaiber
on 13 Feb 09And then there was the uproar about Firewire. Oh wait….
Will it be missed?
Gavin
on 13 Feb 09Reminds me of a move of 37Signals’ in dropping IE6 support.
Kevin
on 13 Feb 09It may have been a valid argument at the time when the rendering device wasn’t digital. At this point it’s not abnormal for media to be recorded, stored, edited, and played back without ever being converted to analog. I think it’s a good call by Apple. In the end, removing this hopefully allows Apple add scope for other more useful features.
Rabbit
on 13 Feb 09Apparently not. People’s wants are determined by virtue of their actions. Pogue admitting that he has “wanted” to edit his taped material for 15 years is evidence that he does not want to, else he would have.
Secondly, Apple isn’t taking anything away from him, because that would be theft, which would imply ownership. Pogue doesn’t have ownership in his ability to edit a particular media format, therefore it is impossible for Apple to take away, or steal, that from him.
Anonymous Coward
on 13 Feb 09If the old camcorder works just fine, and he has a computer that can support it, then don’t upgrade the computer. Sometimes we get so swept up in the endless upgrade cycle that we forget that the old computer was fully capable of meeting our needs. (I Say that with a new Macbook sitting next to me, how hypocritical.)
I still have VHS tapes. I’m not going out to buy a new DVD player then whine that it won’t play my old VHS tapes. I’m holding onto my old VHS player.
Jeff
on 13 Feb 09We certainly still prefer to use tape whenever possible, whether shooting in DV or HD.
There’s nothing like a tangible tape backup, wether it be a MiniDV or DVCPRO HD tape. After shooting to P2 or a hard-drive, you’re forced to allocate one hard-drive as a backup (what would have been your tape), and a second hard-drive to do your editing from and to ultimately archive your project on.
MiniDV aside, I’ve never had a DVCAM or any other professional, large-format tape fail on me. Hard-drives are a different story!
I know this was referring to consumers and consumer-level cameras, but 90% of the video production industry uses Macs too.
Chris Adams
on 13 Feb 09@Jeff: as long as “tangible tape backup” means “in addition to the other backups I have on live media” I agree with you but … I’ve known a few people who made the mistake of trusting media to be readable even just a few years after finishing a project. The stuff is more fragile than people realize and if it’s not regularly used you might not know about it until you lost your primary.
For consumers I’d go with at least three copies: - Live on the computer (or home media server, etc.) - Archived on appropriate media (tape, DVD, etc.) - Backed up online to something like CrashPlan, Carbonite, JungleDisk, etc. which has live (e.g. monitored, regularly accessed) storage.
Sebhelyesfarku
on 13 Feb 09Pogue is Jobs’ ass kisser. So this little “argument” is for just polishing the wise leader’s boot.
carlivar
on 13 Feb 09So to play the edited movies on our HDTVs in a simple, portable format we just burn an HD Blu-ray disc with the Mac’s Blu-ray burner.
Er…
Ken
on 14 Feb 09Advice that sounds decent on the surface, but turns out to be untenable over the long term.
What actually happens is this: Hardware ages and breaks, and a tipping point is passed beyond which it is no longer economical to produce parts or support, and your content becomes inaccessible.
I am going through this now. I have some software titles that only run on Mac OS 9. So I took your advice: I hung onto my last Mac that can boot up off of OS 9 (after my second-to-last one died). Well guess what: Now my last OS 9 machine is dying; the CD drive no longer works right. When that one dies, I can only run OS 9 in Classic on a newer Mac. But not right now, because that Mac runs Mac OS X 10.5, which won’t let you run Classic anymore: I’d have to install 10.4 again. But one day there will be no living Macs that can run 10.4. And so the cliff of death approaches.
My VCR just died, too. I read an article a year or so ago saying all R&D on VCRs had stopped. Now I read that production of pre-recorded VHS tapes has stopped. As far as the VCRs themselves, almost the only ones left that you can buy are the extremely cheaply made ones (not built to last), or those built for video production studios (expensive). But how much longer will those be produced? DVRs have taken the place of VCRs.
The only answer to this is to forget about long-term archiving on any single medium, and just plan to migrate your media every x years. Just assume you will have to do it. The only obstacle, really, is any implementation of copy protection (I was going to say DRM but VHS copy protection is not digital), which makes it more of a challenge to migrate content to current media especially if it is not available for purchase on current media.
Which reminds me…I’d better identify any music I still care about on my cassette tapes, because when my cassette deck dies…
Steven
on 14 Feb 09Could this just be a case of Apple becoming the next big Microsoft, and abandoning support for previous products of theirs?
I realise the camcorder is an old piece of equipment, but it still has its use, even if it’s sheerly for nostalgic reasons.
- Steve From Covert Hypnosis
Zoltan
on 14 Feb 09Yep, that’s fairly similiar to me.
David Smith
on 14 Feb 09Hmmm – hardware company policy requires customers to replace existing functional hardware with purchase of new stuff.
Dog bites man – it’s been done.
Doug
on 14 Feb 09Just because Apple hangs up on old technologies doesn’t mean they’re doomed just yet. Linux still has the compatibility for this stuff.
This is what you get for buying shit from Microsoft and Apple.
Terry Sutton
on 15 Feb 09Your last sentence sums it up pretty good. We all bemoan the coming of new and the leaving of old, but the technology industry depends on people like Jobs. Think of him as the parent who pushes the bird from the nest at age 15.
If Microsoft did more of this, we might be computationally further ahead. We need to be tell people they’re obsolete and there’s nothing we can do for them more often.
Terry Sutton
on 15 Feb 09[sorry – hit enter too fast]
Same argument as with film/digital photography. People will argue [forever] that film is ‘better’ for a host of reasons. The reality is that none of the reasons are measurable, and all of these things are conceptual and in the mind of the beholder.
Purists act like they could pick out a polariod out of a pile of 1000 pictures – but they couldn’t. Skillful phototaking and very skillful Photoshop and printing work would render even the most critical eye skeptical of what’s film and what’s digital.
Tom G
on 15 Feb 09It’s Interesting that the same move can be viewed two ways:
We’re abandoning users to force them to buy new stuff even though the old stuff works fine…
We’re looking to the future to support new capabilities with new technology…
Fortunately the marketplace decides success except where there are monopolies; e.g. only Apple makes Apple computers (OK, I guess Apple is only a monopoly if we make it one through our religeous convictions)
Thomas G.
on 15 Feb 09Hard drives fail easily. Even with backups you always forget to save THAT important file, and now it’s gone. miniDV tapes are much more reliable over time.
Patrick Koppula
on 15 Feb 09I think a PVC (pocket video cam, personal video camera) is likely to come out of Apple’s product process for many of the same reasons the iPod did.
Apple goes after quickly growing hardware markets where it has the best software (iTunes for the DAP market and iMovie for the PVC market). Apple thrives on hardware design opportunities that “unlock” an entire ecosystem. What Sony miniaturizes, Apple mass markets (update: Sony tried to buy Flip, releasing direct competitor in 2009). What Creative Labs’s refines, Apple revolutionizes.
Click on my name for the full argument.
Georgy
on 16 Feb 09I understand Pogue (and can’t decode this as being sincere or faked) and I do feel the pain.
In fact it is even worse than that :
- the current compressed video formats (mpeg or avchd) have to be converted into intermediate formats to be properly edited, with quite a loss in quality, inward and outward
- nothing matches source DV or HDV quality, and these formats take too much space to be stored on hard drives (42 gigs/hour for HDV),
- worse of all, hard drives crash all the time, and when a file is corrupted, the whole footage becomes unreadable, while two seconds of video dropout won’t mess your whole tape.
I’ve lost qui a lot of valuable footage and almost stopped filming my family for three years when I moved to a HDD-based camcorder, because of the shitty mpeg quality that made my vacations look dated as soon as they were recorded.
Now that I’m back to a tape-based workflow I’ve started shooting like mad again. I went crazy when I found out iMovie 08 wouldn’t write back to tape, fortunately iMovie HD still does.
I get the mass-market approach, but I’m sad to watch lossy formats become the norm, just as mp3 did.
Billy Gray
on 16 Feb 09There will always be ways for David to work with his tape using adapters and third-party tech, or old macs, etc. That’s just the way it goes with this sort of technology.
If he’s feeling particularly old-school he can still buy 8mm black and white reversal film right here in nyc, so I doubt he won’t be able to keep working with his tapes. Unless of course he never gets around to it.
Stropp
on 17 Feb 09Perhaps this will cause some hardship in the short-term, but all it will do is open up the ecosystem to other suppliers. I doubt it will be too long before a company will come up with a Apple2Tape device.
Seeing as you can still buy turntables for your old vinyl records, I doubt that videotape will be gone anytime soon.
Jesse
on 18 Feb 09I wonder when 37signals will stop posting tangential self-help on this blog. It’s bound to happen. Reality is not a brand.
This discussion is closed.