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 fireproof "mac safe" is even possessed by the station, dating back to the days when protecting the investment was paramount.

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 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.

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 abandoning of Umatic / SVHS 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 play out. This was partly alleviated during 2002 by the availability of the Einstein TV edit machine, but that disappeared again, leaving us using what is now Graphics PC as an edit suit in the summer term of 2003. The Mac continued to be used for play out because of the poor TV out from the graphics card and concerns over reliability. This was finaly resolved around October/November 2003 when funds came through from YUSU to buy a dedicated Edit PC. By this point crashes during broadcast play-out had become and all to common event (including virtually every clip in the first episode of Small Screen). Edit PC proved both quicker and more reliable, as the rise in CPU powers had made the hardware acceleration unnecessary.

YSTV still has the Mac in a flight case in the studio, because nothing else will play some of the data archived off it, although it has not been used since 2005 when some material was recovered.