At Faith Family Church in Victoria, Texas, what began in 1979 as a small group of believers gathered in a living room has blossomed into a church with an active and engaged congregation of nearly 3,000 members, as well as a weekly show, “Life at its Best,” broadcast locally. As Faith Family continues to grow, so do the demands placed on the church’s production team to provide content to the church’s devoted followers. To alleviate workflow for its editing team, the church recently installed a Small Tree TITANIUM16 Ethernet-based shared storage system.
At Faith Family Church in Victoria, Texas, what began in 1979 as a small group of believers gathered in a living room has blossomed into a church with an active and engaged congregation of nearly 3,000 members, as well as a weekly show, "Life at its Best," broadcast locally. As Faith Family continues to grow, so do the demands placed on the church's production team to provide content to the church's devoted followers.
To alleviate workflow for its editing team, the church recently installed a Small Tree TITANIUM16 Ethernet-based shared storage system featuring 48TBs over 10GbE. Prior to switching to the TITANIUM16, Faith Family's post-production professionals were handling projects via sneaker-net, a solution that had become cumbersome for the editors. Additionally, with the potential for taking its weekly show national, the church's technical director, Joshua Hubble, realized that they would need to consolidate all of their assets to improve efficiencies.
"We were sharing files from computer to computer and would have multiple versions across multiple systems," Hubble said. "With an eye toward a national network broadcast, we had to find a way to bring everything together, audio and video, instead of using the old sneaker-net system where you just grab a hard drive and walk down the hall. Small Tree's shared storage has helped us refine our workflow by organizing all of the files and ensuring that all of the editors sync the same way."
TITANIUM is a high performance, capacity dense, dedicated video editing shared storage appliance with advanced file sharing capabilities enabling simple, real-time collaboration. TITANIUM16 is a 3U rack-mount solution configurable up to 20 GbE or 12 10GbE ports and storage capacity from 32TB to 320TB, while delivering up to 72 streams of ProRes 422.
After the installation of Small Tree's TITANIUM16, the post-production team at Faith Family is experiencing far fewer workstation problems as a result of offloading large content files to the server. According to Hubble, shifting from the Firewire drives has also been of great benefit for meeting tight deadlines with greater peace of mind.
"Some of the drives weren't quite as fast or you would have a drive fail and lose data," Hubble remarked. "We haven't lost anything since installing the TITANIUM16. On top of that, our editors have been able to work faster and share things more easily."
Responsible for editing audio, as well as overall project management, Hubble has been impressed and pleased with a number of benefits resulting from the TITANIUM16.
"Before installing the Small Tree system, we would spend a good day to a day and a half of transferring data to drives," Hubble concluded. "So the biggest benefit for me is to be able to handle audio post-production from my workstation while managing the project from a single file that everyone has access to. As a result, we've probably shortened the post process by a day."
For more information about Small Tree and its growing line of shared storage and networking products, visit www.small-tree.com. Follow Small Tree on Facebook at www.facebook.com/SmallTreeComm or on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.