Sony's FireWire/IEEE 1394 designation — digital data connection for HD cameras and external recorders. Obsolete via USB-C and Thunderbolt.
In the early 2000s, i.Link was the standard connection between HD cameras and external recorders—Sony had simply decided to market FireWire/IEEE 1394 under its own label. In practice, this was a digital interface with up to 400 Mbps (later 800 Mbps), through which uncompressed or losslessly compressed video signals could be transmitted without loss of quality. This was a real feature at the time: while DV-In/Out could only handle compressed 25 Mbps material, i.Link enabled higher data rates and made external storage on hard drives or professional recorders realistic.
On set, it worked like this: HDV cameras (Sony HVR series, Panasonic GS series) had i.Link sockets, you plugged a FireWire cable into a portable recorder or desktop capture system, and the data stream flowed in real-time. This was particularly valuable for ENG setups—you could record simultaneously without stressing the camera. In editing, the usual workflow followed: i.Link grab via editing software (Final Cut Pro, Vegas), proxy generation, offline edit. This sounded technically cleaner than digitizing from tape via Composite or S-Video.
The problem was: i.Link cables were expensive, driver support was inconsistent, and the standard itself was already dying in the 2010s. USB 3.0 emerged, Thunderbolt took over the role distribution, and suddenly nobody needed 400 Mbps over a separate cable anymore. Modern cameras (RED, Sony FX30, even cheaper models) use USB-C or HDMI for external recording—faster, more universal, less accessory chaos. Today, you'll only find i.Link equipment in archive digitization projects or legacy HDV inventories. Anyone with old tapes still has to deal with this stuff—but for new productions, the term is long past its prime.