Camera operator worshipping with the praise band for online church; image: Robby - stock.adobe.com
Today’s church media production teams face many of the same challenges: demanding turnaround times, disconnected workflows, budgetary constraints, and so on.
The following stories explore what matters most when it comes to media storage for church video production teams, and how it all comes together—performance, capacity, budget, collaboration, live editing, remote access, cloud workflows, scalability, and more—with the SNS EVO shared storage server.
Learn more about SNS shared storage solutions for churches here.
Church by the Glades
When Mauricio Tinoco arrived at Church by the Glades (CBG) as their new Film Team Director, CBG’s video storage solution was basically a media cabinet jammed with stacks of USB drives. They had a shared server, but it was cobbled together, the team couldn’t edit from it, and it was egregiously slow. It didn’t take long for Tinoco to start his search for a new video storage option for his church's video production team.
He of course needed storage capacity and speed, but he also needed something that was easy to administer and available with a “ministry-on-a-budget” price tag. He found exactly what he needed in the high-performance and cost-effective EVO shared storage server.
“I was almost shocked at how easy it was to get it up and running,” says Tinoco. “As far as separating it out into workspaces and setting up user privileges, it was incredibly simple.” Beyond setup and installation, he adds that gathering footage was the easiest part of using EVO because everything was in a centralized location and easy to get to.
Tinoco explains how his team collaborated more quickly on shared media with EVO. “While I’m editing one highlight reel, I had three volunteers on other stations finding more clips. As soon as they finished, they’d holler from the other room, ‘Hey, Mo, you want to grab this footage?’ and I would just pull it over. Before we had EVO, something like that would not have been possible in that amount of time.”
EVO is ready for whatever CBG wants to take on next, with scalability to meet their current and future needs. “I think we’re barely using half of the amount of connections we can make,” adds Tinoco. “We could easily add four more team members and still be able to run with the server the way it is. It’s been a great tool.”
Christ Community Chapel
When speaking of his team’s old workflow, Michael Seng, Video Director at Christ Community Chapel, says, “It was very convoluted.” Various handoffs and disconnected systems were taking their toll on the team’s live productions and post-production projects. They needed a solution to not only store their media, but to give them a better workflow overall.
After a significant amount of research, Christ Community Chapel settled on the best solution for their needs: the 16 Bay EVO media production server. Built for creative video production teams, EVO shared storage solutions include the EVO suite, a collection of software tools designed to improve creative workflow. Now, Christ Community Chapel can store, organize, share, and create content faster than ever before.
Seng’s team uses EVO’s included ShareBrowser media asset manager to search, preview, tag, comment, and collaborate on their media. “Wading through files used to waste a lot of time,” says Seng. “ShareBrowser helps me narrow down our media library to only share the files my team needs.”
His team can even start editing their projects before the live sermon has finished recording. “We have multiple editors pulling in footage while the live stream is going on. Live-editing saves my video team a couple hours every week. That may not sound like a lot, but in our world, that can be huge,” Seng says. “We live in a world where minutes and seconds make a difference, so something that can save hours is a game-changer.”
“I just love that it saves time,” he adds. “Projects that used to be impossible because of time constraints are no longer impossible.”
The Life Church
Like any professional video production team, video editing for a house of worship can become an all-day affair as deadlines approach. “Sometimes it can be 24/7, working around the clock,” says Brian Pitre, Creative Director at The Life Church. That’s why reliability is so important for church media storage systems.
The Life Church needed a shared storage solution that offered a collaborative workflow and could handle their busy production schedule. “All of the video editors work on the TV program, almost like an assembly line,” Pitre says about his video production team. “One handles the prep edit, then a couple of people do the main edit, and then a couple do audio production and titles.”
The Life Church relies on their EVO video editing server to keep the "assembly line" running smoothly. “EVO gives us greater peace of mind,” says Pitre. “I know I’m not going to come in and find I’m missing a drive somewhere on a workstation.”
To put it another way, “EVO is absolutely solid,” Pitre adds. “It has never been down. Not once.”
Mindfile Multimedia
Mindfile Multimedia is a full-service production company serving a diverse clientele, including houses of worship. “Our biggest project is probably our weekly televised Catholic mass,” says James Curry, Founder and CEO at Mindfile Multimedia. “It is broadcast all over the world via cable and internet. We generate a lot of content for worship services, and it’s all stored on our EVO server.”
Mindfile’s five-year-old EVO server continues to serve their production team well, and they recently ordered a new EVO to expand their storage capacity and take advantage of newer features, like enhanced workflows with TriCaster and remote editing with Nomad, part of the included EVO suite of software tools.
Using EVO’s remote editing and cloud workflow solutions, Mindfile can connect their post-production team to their shared storage media server from anywhere in the world. “Beyond improvements to our video production workflow, these new features are really making us rethink our whole business model,” says Curry about EVO’s remote production capabilities. “We won’t need to have any editors physically present in the studio at all.”
To see how the EVO shared storage server and its included EVO suite of workflow tools can help your worship team create amazing content faster, schedule a live demo today.
