creative.space is more than hardware, software, and proactive support. It's a platform designed to accelerate your team's creative potential.
Forward-thinking churches are investing heavily in video production due to the growing importance of social media, having a great web presence, and now the pandemic. As a result, churches are creating massive amounts of content including testimonials, sermon bumpers, promos, and much more.
While much attention is given to cameras, lenses, lighting and editing platforms, decisions on content management, archiving, and storage are often left until later—much later, like until storage has become a big problem.
Storage decisions often require buy-in from the creatives, department managers, and ultimately the church's executive pastor or business administrator. Why? Because the video content storage solution has to:
1. Fit the church’s video acquisition and editing workflow
2. Be compatible with the church’s IT network infrastructure
3. Ultimately, it has to be affordable.
Enter DigitalGlue’s creative.space, an enterprise-class storage server that is greatly improving production productivity and efficiency at a time when video is playing a huge role in a church’s ability to deliver their message to their congregation. Unlike other storage solutions, creative.space offers a service-based “Fog” pricing model, bundling hardware, software, and proactive support into one all-inclusive fixed monthly or annual rate, making it extremely competitive against those that require large capital outlays.
If you’re an editor or video director, the first thing you’ll notice is how easy it is for your post-production team to mount and collaborate within files/folders on a Mac, PC, or Linux machine either on the local network or remote connection. Yes, your team can ingest, manage and edit remotely—and at the time of day when they are most creative.
creative.space is the only solution that gives editors the ability to share files and entire folder structures between remote and local storage with FTP using the credentials and permissions managed by the integrated LDAP system.
Creatives will also enjoy the ability to streamline their file and folder naming system using the Folder Structure Template feature, which also makes finding assets super easy with the built-in Search engine. Then, there is the Ingest feature that allows jump drives or USB devices like camera cards to be connected to the back of the storage server and copied directly over the 12GB backplane without the need for another computer or network connection. The View Connected Users feature allows real-time viewing of who is on the system, how they are connecting, and what files they are using on their project. Finally, since this “Fog” storage service is located at your facility, you have the flexibility to connect via 1, 2.5, 10, 25, 40, or even 100GB over an Ethernet switch without any ingress/egress charges typically associated with “cloud,” which can be a huge cost and time savings.
For the technical director or IT manager, creative.space is simple to use with tools designed to make your days more manageable. For example, creative.space has its own built-in LDAP server for User and Group access and permissions, giving administrators the ability to easily activate/deactivate users like contractors and volunteers. The entire process is simple to navigate, ensuring that users only have access to the files/folders associated with the projects they are working on or have permission to view. creative.space is the only solution that gives editors the ability to share files and entire folder structures between remote and local storage with FTP using the credentials and permissions managed by the integrated LDAP system. While other storage solutions support FTP, they force users to spend additional time transferring files in and out of a specific shared directory, resulting in slower project turn around.
creative.space has completely integrated a software-based VPN, ZeroTier, making it highly secure for working remotely. The built-in Proactive Monitoring System collects and reports up to 2,000 metrics per second. In addition to seeing in real-time which specific user may be hogging all the CPU, RAM, or bandwidth on the network, your creative.space storage will also let you know weeks in advance if a hard drive is at risk of failure. It will also tell you that because of the file John Doe is currently work on, the system will run out of storage capacity in five hours, and that your HVAC is down because the server is getting warm, even though no one is using it at 8 p.m. These are all real-life events from customers and how the creative.space Monitoring system saved them.
One of the coolest features is the Snapshots scheduler and interface. A Snapshot is a virtual photo of your storage’s data at any given time. Snapshots can be taken instantly with the click of a button or scheduled at a certain date/time in the future. For example, an Administrator can schedule a recurring Snapshot to be taken every hour for 24 hours, and then set it to delete the oldest one on the 25th hour every day of the week until told to stop. Never lose valuable data to accidental deletion or ransomware again. Advanced Snapshots features allow users to easily roll back deleted or modified files, folders, or even the entire system within minutes.
For the executive pastor or business administrator, how would you like to change a painful capital expense into an affordable, operational one? For the new super-fast //ROGUE PRO with (6) 16TB helium-filled enterprise hard drives for 96TB of RAW storage, the price is only $595 a month ($7,140 annually) based on a three-year contract. This price includes proactive monitoring and technical support, all creative.space workflow software with unlimited upgrades, an on-site spare kit, and next-day advanced RMA replacement. Customers find just the proactive monitoring and support worth this monthly/annually amount compared to the cost of in-house IT support/experience, but they get the 96TB of RAW storage and software as well. Since creative.space is a “Fog” storage system, meaning it resides at your facility and not some unknown datacenter(s), there are no monthly variable fees to upload or download your own content that you have to pay to a “cloud” service provider.
Finally, for those that make it all the way to the end of this article, mention code “CP1120” when speaking to a DigitalGlue salesperson to get a free Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro ISO with your creative.space order. If you are not aware of the ATEM Mini Pro ISO, you should look it up now and be blown away with all its features that can help any church with its production workflow.
