For a typical weekend service at Generations Church, a contemporary house of worship in Yuma (AZ) that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, roughly 90Gb of SD video and multi-track audio are produced and duplicated for its loyal congregation members. As the congregation's demand for content continued to increase, so too did the challenges facing the church's post-production team.
Working on a 2TB RAID that they were sharing over OS X AFP, the post-production projects were piling up for the Generation Church editing team. While they managed to produce quality videos for their congregation, the difficulties working across such an environment, which included dealing with system-wide crashes and lost work, were beginning to impact the team's ability to meet pressing deadlines. Having recently opened churches in Phoenix and Charlotte, which would increase demand even further, the editing team was in desperate need of a solution to improve its workflow and project management capabilities.
The post-production environment at Generations Church features two dedicated desktop Mac Pros, two new i7 iMacs and up to six Macbook Pros with editors working primarily in Final Cut and Adobe After Effects. To maximize its resources, the church implemented Small Tree's GraniteSTOR 16TB ST-RAID Ethernet-based shared storage system for Mac users. Robust and cost-effective, the 16TB ST-RAID easily meets Generation Church's requirements of enabling up to five editors to access shared data across the server at one time. With the new shared storage solution, the system isn't crashing, frames aren't being dropped, projects are no longer piling up and deadlines are met - much to the delight of Zeke McGeehon, media producer for Generations Church.
"It was terrible not having a dedicated server to share data across the editing team," McGeehon said. "We were limited on how many projects we could work on and how many streams of video we could handle. Today, with the Small Tree system, we don't have to worry about that anymore. All of the media we need is available to anyone on the team, wherever they're working from in the facility and whenever they need it."
Along with the system's affordability and reliability, ST-RAID's scalability was extremely attractive to Generation Church directors, as the church continues to grow and the number of projects continues to add up. Running across ubiquitous Ethernet, ST-RAID is easy to add onto as needed. So if Generations Church needs additional storage in two to three years, rather than having to throw out a system and start anew, the post-production team will need only to add another storage box from Small Tree to meet new workflow demands.
Designer of simple-to-install, affordable Mac-based networking and shared storage products, Small Tree is the premier multi-port Ethernet networking technology provider for OS X customers, enabling cost effective Ethernet shared storage technology.
For more information about the company and its products, please call 1-866-STC4MAC (1-866-782-4622), or visit www.small-tree.com or follow Small Tree on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.
