Northwoods Community Church in Peoria, Ill., produces plenty of video for its 4,000+-member congregation every week: an announcement intro, several testimony videos, sermon bumpers and video classes. Sunday services feature a 14x50-foot center screen, plus environmental or architectural projection. Afterwards, recordings go to video venue campuses in Galesburg and Chillicothe, and to the church website (a live stream of the service is now in beta test).
Video Content Creator David Marks manages all this content with two part-time assistants. A recent major upgrade that took video production from a shared tech booth to a dedicated master control room plus three editing suites has certainly helped. But the biggest change, says Marks, has been the upgrade from isolated workstations and single-hard-drive archives with Post-It note labels to a networked digital content storage and management system from EditShare.
Northwoods took a quantum leap into the present with shared network storage, data management and archival backup to tape. “Network storage is great,” Marks says. “But if you don't have a solution that effectively archives data and retrieves it in a logical manner, you don't have a true full system answer.”
Northwoods' new content management system from EditShare includes a 32TB 3U Energy server with the company's Flow asset management capabilities and Ark file-based ingest and archive-to-tape functions. Marks describes the new streamlined workflow: “We ingest (Panasonic) P2 cards through Final Cut Pro 7 to the Energy server. Our church services are also captured directly through a Blackmagic Decklink Extreme card. The setup allows our three editors simultaneous access to all material for logging and any necessary editing.”
The biggest benefit of network storage and content management “is having files and resources just a few clicks away,” Marks reports. “It's great to finally have linear tape-open (LTO) tape backup and be able to recall a clip in minutes. Now we have complete integration of every project. And we have a shared administrator space to store software downloads, serial numbers and workflow documents. Complete project organization has greatly improved how we work.”
Church-obtainable technology
As digital technology becomes ever more powerful and affordable, tools that were once available only to large-scale content producers are now within the affordable reach of many small- to medium-sized churches. Moving from networked hard drives to storage area networks (SANs) can improve workflow and productivity. Content management (attaching metadata to raw content, then cataloging it using a searchable relational database) can turbocharge your video production team. The typical Excel file is way beyond the Post-It notes that Northwood was using, but as a “flat file,” it lacks relational capabilities. On the input side, a relational database standardizes information formats, which makes retrieval much faster and easier. The time saved can be put into more polished and creative productions. Searchable archives can be powerful educational tools and support new ministry and revenue streams.
The biggest benefit of network storage and content management “is having files and resources just a few clicks away.”
The current video technology landscape is broad and diverse. As you explore it, you'll want to get familiar with acronyms like JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks—my personal fave), SSD (Solid State Disks), RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), DAS (Direct Attached Storage), NAS (Network Attached Storage), SMB (Server Message Block, aka Samba, a Windows protocol), iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) and FC (Fiber Channel). Tech evolution has even created nested acronyms like SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SES (SCSI Enclosure Services).
Dave Marks' very thorough research lasted almost a year before Northwoods' EditShare system arrived on campus. But EditShare is by no means the only affordable player in the content management and storage market. Here are a few places you can start looking for next-generation storage and content management tools. While the following systems have prices that vary significantly based on options and configurations, all are under $100,000, and several companies offer options for less than $10,000.
Options abound
Enhance Technology's new UltraStore 4200 is a low-cost SAN that boasts VMWare VSphere 5 certification. The ES4200 series uses 3.5-inch drives, and comes with native VAAI (vStorage API [Application Programming Interface] for Array Integration) support. The storage array handles asynchronous replication and snapshot processing, reducing the load on the server CPU. You can hook ES4200 drives up to 10 gigabyte or one gigabyte Ethernet via iSCSI: a hybrid FC/iSCSI option is also available. With internal processors delivering full hardware iSCSI acceleration, the ES4200 Series has real time I/O throughput. Dual active-active storage controllers and redundant, load-balancing power supplies support 24/7 data availability for SMB users.
The ES4200 series packs 24 3.5-inch disks into four rack spaces. Spinning disks deliver “the highest level of value and performance for most data environments” according to Aaron Eskridge, Enhance Technology's Channel Sales Manager. With up to 384TB of storage and easy expandability (thanks to thin provisioning, which improves disk utilization and allows additional drives to be connected without disrupting the SAN) the ES4200 should be able to support most church's data management needs for quite a while. Expansion is available via either additional RAIDs or JBOD expansion shelves. Either way, the ES4200 series has the industry's lowest cost-per-terabyte, according to Enhance Technology.
JMR Electronics designs and manufactures servers, RAID systems and networked storage servers like the BlueStor DigiLab, engineered as a complete all-in-one work flow solution with on-set processing and cinema-quality resolution. Third party software enables DigiLab to take you from raw ingest all the way through digital imaging, debayering (a hard-to-describe algorithmic process that enables one-shot cameras to produce RGB color images) and finishing to BluRay disks. It runs many flavors of Windows or Linux on quad-core Intel processors and is approved by major video software developers like Adobe, Assimilate, Avid, Blackmagic (DaVinci) and others. Patented PCI-Express DAS technology delivers transfer rates over 1.5GB/s. NVIDIA graphics cards are standard: others are available on request.
BlueStor ingests video via its BluRay R-W optical drive and a 19-in-1 media reader, then stores it on a built-in 16-disk RAID that makes 16TB to 64TB (terabytes) of storage native to the server. JMR-engineered backplane and SAS Expander technology dampen drive vibrations and enhance cooling, extending operating life.
If transcoding is important to you, the SES 2.0-compliant BlueStor Rapid Encode server has built-in Digital Rapids elements. Dual 6Gb SAS hardware controllers boost transfer rates to 1800 MB/s with rotating disks or 2800 MB/s using SSDs.
Quantum's StorNext M440 metadata appliance and StorNext QX1200 48TB RAID system enable content creators to produce and broadcast HD, 2K and 4K video. The StorNext M440 is built on the new StorNext 5 platform, designed to handle high-resolution video. If you're already using Apple Xsan, StorNext will fit right in: it's the only system that's 100% compatible with existing Xsan installations, and it supports any number of Xsan clients. The StorNet package also includes 10 Windows/Linux clients, three years of 24/7 customer support and one year of software maintenance. StorNext products support the industry's most popular media asset managers as well as popular editing, finishing, ingest, transcode, and playout software, including products from Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid and Telestream. For automated backup to an LTO tape archive, add StorNext's AEL 500 Mini. More information can be found at www.stornext.com.
Sony offers an alternate to both spinning hard drives (which have limited life spans, even in redundant arrays) and solid states drives (currently the most expensive option for high-capacity data storage). The company's Optical Disc Archive System is based on BluRay technology, with refinements from the Professional Disc (XDCAM) format.
Sony read/write optical media is rated for a 50-year lifespan, and its system can grow with your needs. Start with an ODS-D77U or ODS-D55U USB 3.0 optical drive (the D77U is more than twice as fast) Windows or Mac OS X drivers let you use the drive like any other external drive. The drive also includes a license for Sony's Optical Disc Archive Content Manager software, which adds Browse, Search, Archive and Watched Folder capabilities through a GUI.
Sony's optical media comes in cartridges for ease of handling and protection. You can upgrade from the 300 GB starter cartridge to 600 GB, 1.2 TB and 1.5 TB cartridges. If shuttling from storage shelf to drive becomes tedious, you can upgrade by plugging standalone drives into the desktop/rack-mount ODS-L10 library, which holds 10 cartridges (up to 15 TB of capacity; about 500 hours of 4:2:2 HD video) along with two drives. File Manager Software is designed for NAS and lets you organize the library by project, client, or operator. The ODS-L30M is similar but larger system.
For even more storage, plus multi-location access, upgrade again to the X-Disc Archive. This midrange Sony Media Backbone can store up to 85,000 hours (nearly 10 years) of HD. It makes search, fast forward and rewind available anywhere online, with proxy video, thumbnail pictures, documents and searchable metadata. A wide range of video formats from Sony and third parties (Apple, Avid and Panasonic) are supported.
This brief list is by no means comprehensive: it's intended to get you thinking about the options. As the focus of modern media consumers continues to gravitate to screens large and small, your video content will continue to grow in importance. The major productivity gains enjoyed from the much-improved workflow at Northwoods Community Church could be well within your grasp, so this is a great time to reach out for up-to-date technology.
