The Mac: Difference between revisions

By "The Mac" we mean YSTV's first venture into the world of Apple Macintosh computers, our 1998 Mac-based edit suite. In 2011 YSTV again wrangled enough (although now significantly less) money out of YUSU to buy an iMac to open up the possibility of editing using Final Cut Pro.  

At the time of purchase it was incredibly expensive, some £6000, and took YSTV a number of years to pay back YUSU the funds needed to buy it. A solid steel "mac safe" was mandated on insurance grounds, as protecting the investment was paramount. There were only two safe keys, one of which was on the shared key fob held by the porter and the other by the [[Station Director]].

    

It is too 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. The digital copies of [[Mmmbop]], [[50%]] titles, and [[Nony nony nah]] were all done by putting a parasite machine on the spare shelf of the safe and leaving the flattened movie files transferring over a weekend (!) from the serial port via ZModem.

Whilst the picture quality obtained from the system was and is very good, its 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 abandoning of [[Sony Umatic]]/[[JVC SVHS]] editing and quick PC editing.

YSTV still has the Mac in a flight case in the studio, although it has not been used since 2005 (although it was fired up at one point in early 2011 by [[Michael Cullen]] to have a bit of a play - it still works), primarily to allow exported material to be recovered - though this is also possible using QuickTime 6.5 on a PC with Media 100's iFinish plugin.