Firewire support in Big Sur

Hi, We have recently upgraded to Big Sur and our Phase one IQ380 crashes the whole computer when a firewire cable is plugged in. PhaseOne have said that they have been informed by Apple that firewire tethering with any device via a dongle will no longer be supported from Big Sur onwards. I feel your pain here as we too also have a lot of expensive specialist photographic equipment that I fear may be destined for the scrap heap.

Apple makes a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter. You can try that, but just know that Firewire was developed in the late 1980's. That's 40 years ago!

Standards move forward.

Technologies move forward.

This is natural.

Maybe buy a refurbished Mac for your Firewire needs.

If push came to shove can't you use a USB card reader for the Leaf memory cards?

Agreed, my workflow is 100% tethered and relies on instant and constant monitoring of images as they are shot by my digi op, art directors, stylists, make-up artists, models etc. The bonus of the firewire cable was its stability over greater lengths, we were able to shoot at 10m with no boosters as opposed to the current USB3 options that struggle above 5m. In a large studio with a big crew that can be an issue. Yes technology does move forward but sometimes we are also herded to a convenient commercial position by monolithic companies. There is a history of great tech that has been forgotten in the march of progress. I used to be able to fly from London to NYC in 3.5 hours.......... at a cost of course.

I'm not sure "removed software" is the whole story here.

I am happily using FW800 hard disks without trouble on Big Sur 11.1.

I hear Hasselblad have tested their firewire backs with Big Sur and see no problems (even on an M1 Mac).

I've read that CaptureOne had issues, but there's a new release which support Big Sur.

https://tinyurl.com/yav2ymmx

So hopefully any problems are just the usual new os bugs rather than "support removed".

I am in the same boat with a Hasselblad H5D it is infuriating and frustrating. I have just invested thousands in the new Mac Pro 2019, and wanted to update to Big Sur. But I guess we'll have to stay with 10.15

System Information on my 2019 MacBook Pro running Big Sur shows a FireWire section, so it would appear that it's still a part of macOS, at least for the time being.

Given it's an Intel CPU I would imagine Big Sur on 2019 Mac Pro would also be the same, but I've yet to upgrade mine, so cannot confirm.

For 10m USB3 connection, you need the tether cables from Capture Integration in Atlanta and the USB3 extensions from area51 tether company in NY.

From my experience, Big Sur doesn't support firewire. I use firewire to connect an old macbook pro to an iMac for quicker file transfers. Big Sur took this away so I downgraded back to Catalina. It's crazy that these things aren't optional regardless of how old the technologies are. Apple should allow a firewire driver and if it's not used, it's not used, rather than just deprecating it without considering the impact. Big Sur didn't offer that much of a change from Catalina anyway in my opinion.

Firewire works fine here on my 2019 Mac Pro running Big Sur with a PCIe FW card.

Yeah I have MOTU equipment that supports FW800 and USB2. Over FW it stopped working. The transfer rate that I used to get over FW is less over USB2. Not happy.