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. 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. When crashes during broadcast play-out became all to common during 2003 it was finally replaced by a PC-based edit suite, as the rise in CPU powers had made the hardware acceleration necessary.