Apple to Recieve Academy Award for Invention of FireWireby Robin LissPublished on Aug 22, 2001 12:00 AM 
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The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences today announced that apple computer will be receiving the engineering award for their development of FireWire. FireWire is used by television production professionals, consumers and event videographers to transfer their video digitally from their camcorder or digital VCR to their computer with zero quality degradation. It is a technology that has revolutionized the home video and professional video industry.
FireWire was developed by Apple in 1994 as a high speed transfer protocol. With the advent of digital camcorders in 1996, and the early dominance by Apple in the non-linear computer video editing market pushed FireWire to become the standard for seamless transfer of video. The protocol is also known as IEEE 1394. Sony adopted the protocol early on in their camcorders, renaming it i.Link and now it is a standard feature on all digital camcorders.
FireWire has really helped deliver digital video editing to the masses. Because it is a digital format, it allows for cheap production of editing cards for computers which can produce high quality video at under $100. Interestingly, FireWire has been adopted as a standard by both consumers and professionals for digital video transfer. It’s closest competitor is SDI (Serial Digital Interface) which is only used by the largest video production houses with also the largest budgets. The cost of using SDI is many multiples larger than FireWire. A few years ago, when Sony released the very popular $11,000 DSR-300 camcorder (that’s a low price for a pro cam of it’s caliber), with out a FireWire port, the industry exploded with disapproval and Sony came out with a new version, a few months later that included FireWire.
It seems that the award is a little late. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences commented that in the past year FireWire has grown to become a standard in the desktop video industry however, most would argue that FireWire became a standard about three or four years ago. Understandably, Apple is getting the credit for FireWire as they should, but the Academy credited apple devices and computers as becoming the standard in the television production industry, however PC’s using FireWire cards far outnumber Apple computers using the standard they created. Apple deserves credit, but maybe not that much credit, and it’s late in coming.