With offices in six countries, a 24-hour online channel, a dedicated YouTube channel, a thriving echurch community and more, College Park, GA-based World Changers Church International creates a massive amount of content. “Something that doesn’t get finished during the day can now be finished at home. That type of remote [video} work now plays a large role in our workflow,” says Mark Hawley, broadcast and IT engineer at the church.
As its name implies, World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia has a global reach. Through the efforts of its co-founders, Creflo and Taffi Dollar, the church has grown to become a leader in the local, national, and international communities. Known for simple, practical teaching and promoting a better understanding of the Bible, the ministry has offices in India, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Canada, as well as a thriving e-Church community. Their productions have grown to include their award-winning Changing Your World television broadcast that reaches nearly one billion homes, a dedicated YouTube channel, and the Changing Your World Network, a 24-hour online channel. The ministry’s thriving social media presence and app that’s available on mobile devices and smart TVs also utilize these productions. With such a strong focus on delivering quality media, team coordination and teamwork are key to making it all happen.
EditShare offers a suite of products to help you store, edit, and manage video on-prem or in the cloud. For more information, please visit EditShare.com.
"Having the right tools in place to support our workflow also helped us to avert the potential disruption that most churches experienced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.” - Mark Hawley, Broadcast and IT Engineer, World Changers Church International
“Understanding and facilitating our production workflow has been an important factor in our popularity and growth,” says Mark Hawley, the church’s busy broadcast and IT engineer. “Having the right tools in place to support our workflow also helped us to avert the potential disruption that most churches experienced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Our editors have different needs and preferences,” Hawley says. “EditShare had integrations with them all..." Users are free to use the tool that fits them or the project best; a feature that resonates with Hawley’s team of master and spot editors.
In 2019, shortly before the pandemic, Hawley and his team became frustrated with their workflow tools. “We regularly had 10-12 editors and additional team members working on various projects with various tools. As a result, the complexity of having multiple tools with multiple service agreements was becoming very cumbersome”, he recalls. “Plus, exports were taking a long time.” Adding to the friction in the workflow, Hawley’s previous storage system with multiple modules and servers had difficulty working with the NLE software preferences of the editors. After seeing EditShare’s ability to handle network shared storage and media management for other organizations, Hawley was eager to see how EditShare's FLOW media management platform could help World Changers Church create smarter workflows.
Editshare EFS ... integrates seamlessly with industry-leading creative tools from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, Blackmagic, and others.
Moving Away from Multiple Storage Volumes
At the heart of more intelligent and flexible workflows is EditShare’s storage solution, EFS. It works across hardware to provide a single namespace that eliminates the need to manage multiple storage volumes. One advantage of this smart storage is that additional capacity can simply be added as needed. Once installed, the system ‘rebalances’ the distribution of files over the added space, which can be anything from a single storage node to an expansive cluster. Having scalability designed into the system eliminates the snags and overhead that church media teams like Hawley’s endure when adding to traditional storage.
Because EFS was built to handle storage for a collaborative environment, it integrates seamlessly with industry-leading creative tools from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, Blackmagic, and others. Users are free to use the tool that fits them or the project best; a feature that resonates with Hawley’s team of master and spot editors. “Our editors have different needs and preferences,” he says. “EditShare had integrations with them all, so it seemed very familiar right away.” An additional bonus for World Changers Church operations was EditShare’s ability to handle their needs for deep storage and even provided integration with an existing tape storage system.
Achieving more than just compatibility, the EFS Native Client is a powerful multi-threaded application for macOS, Windows, and Linux that tightly manages read and write streams while avoiding the latency and overhead of legacy protocols. In addition, administrators can easily control user permissions, project security, enforce storage quotas, and see complete details of user actions on files and directories, all through a friendly web-based user interface.
“There was a kind of revelation about technology in the church community: Where before [the pandemic] church leadership might have had doubts or want proof before investing in technology, now they are much more apt to say, ‘If you have new technology, bring it!’” - Mark Hawley, Broadcast and IT Engineer, World Changers Church International
For churches moving away from on-premise storage, EditShare even offers FLEX, a suite of cloud-based asset management and storage software. This can extend video production and media management to public cloud storage environments, including AWS.
Much More Than Storage
With EditShare’s EFS, Hawley’s team had a storage environment that simplified administration and supported their creative tools, but addressing the restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic showed the value of EditShare’s FLOW Media Management.
“AirFLOW became very important for our operation as we sent QC folks and our editors to work at home,” recalls Hawley. “The application made it easy to access folders and keep us all working remotely. It kept the process going.”
EditShare’s storage solution, EFS, works across hardware to provide a single namespace that eliminates the need to manage multiple storage volumes. Once installed, the system ‘rebalances’ the distribution of files over the added space, which can be anything from a single storage node to an expansive cluster.
AirFLOW has a simple and intuitive web-based interface that lets collaborators located anywhere in the world search, log, organize, and play media content. They can also upload and download content directly to and from EditShare central storage systems. Producers can look in on work-in-progress and view rough and fine cuts on a device of their choice–laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Reviewers can add comments, which are written to the FLOW database in real-time and can be timecode-tagged. Organizations with multiple facilities can search for and exchange material from any of their sites. AirFLOW also supports easily customizable metadata templates, AirFLOW can be deployed to support diverse workflows such as review and approval, outsourced transcriptions, marketing archival material for sale to third parties, and proxy editing with relinking to high-resolution files.
With the realization that editors would not be coming back right away, Hawley’s team looked to FLOW production tools to help them redesign their workflow to include remote work. “It took some time to set up equipment, and reconfigure our data center for higher bandwidth”, he says “but with just a brief learning curve, FLOW Asset Management became our “go-to” solution.” Within just two-three weeks, World Changers Church was meeting deadlines and streamlining operations.
“We had used AirFLOW with occasional outside editors and had FLOW Browse installed locally,” Hawley recalls, “so we weren’t starting from scratch. That made the transition to predominantly remote work pretty seamless. Common tasks like using AirFLOW to drop comments on an editor's timeline became a very natural thing.”
Workflows for the Future
Hawley is grateful for the fortuitous timing. “I thank God for what we had when the pandemic hit,” he says. “Because we already had the tools in place, we didn’t need to do what a lot of other churches had to: put on the brakes and figure out what to use. Already having EditShare in-house made things a lot better and faster for us.”
Many on Hawley’s team are back at work as conditions have improved, but the flexibility to work remotely greatly adds to the possibilities for World Changers Church production efforts. EditShare’s support for professional broadcast codecs (including wide format), real-time collaboration tools, efficient NLE integration, and the ability to work across multiple locations is changing how people work. “Something that doesn’t get finished during the day can now be finished at home,” Hawley notes. “That type of remote work now plays a large role in our workflow.” Their operation has changed, he says, because they have the right tools and because people across his organization have become more comfortable with the Internet. “Much of how we work today is the result of what we all learned during the pandemic,” he says. “Having EditShare and keeping our heads, we came out of the storm pretty well.”
Post-pandemic, Hawley sees a renewed focus on the benefits that new technology can have for worship, especially tools that enable better video production workflows. “There was a kind of revelation about technology in the church community: Where before church leadership might have had doubts or want proof before investing in technology, now they are much more apt to say, ‘If you have new technology, bring it!’”
EditShare offers a suite of products to help you store, edit, and manage video on-prem or in the cloud. For more information, please visit EditShare.com.
