The Mac

By The Mac we mean YSTV's sole venture into the world of Macintosh computers so far, our 1998 Mac-based edit suite. At the time of purchase it was incredibly expensive, and took YSTV a number of years to pay back YUSU the funds needed to buy it. A "mac safe" is even possessed by the station, dating back to the days when it was thought someone would try and steal it given the chance!

This is a 233MHz beige G3, fitted with a Media 100qx hardware acceleration card in order to be able to capture and play back video in real time. It is to old to have a Firewire port, and so capture and export can only be analogue. An external 16GB SCSI disk drive provides some extra storage space (but not much!). With no writeable optical drive and only a 10Mbit network connection, finding enough free space to edit in was a perennial problem.

Whilst the picture quality obtained from the system was and is very good, it's Achilles heel was the interfacing between MacOS 8.2 and the hardware capture card. This combined with the dubious stability of Adobe Premeire 5.5 for Mac meant that crashes whilst working or during the marathon render times were all to common. In practice, because of this it was rarely used for much other than short VTs and title sequences towards the end - for example, rendering a simple caption would take around ten minutes. This is one reason why Bulletin (again) rarely had VTs towards the end of its run, falling in the gap between the abadoning of Umatic editing and quick PC editing.

There was also the problem that new, VT-heavy shows such as YSTV Week, Small Screen and The Music Show simply couldn't run using the Mac to edit or playout. The YSTV Edit PC began to be used for editing in the summer term of 2003, but the Mac continued to be used for playout until around October/November when it was decided there was little point using different machines for editing and playout - and when crashes during broadcast play-out became all to common during 2003 (including virtually every clip in the first episode of Small Screen) it was finally replaced by the PC-based edit suite, as the rise in CPU powers had made the hardware acceleration unnecessary.