Modern church film and video teams are continually called upon to deliver a wide variety of content, including feature-length worship experiences, teaching curriculum, life-change stories, promo videos, recap videos and short-form narrative content. Footage and other media assets are often captured with the intention of utilizing and repurposing the content across multiple projects over a period of multiple months, or even years.
creative.space //Rogue
Designed for smaller post-production teams with 1-4 editing stations, the //ROGUE is a specialized data management device that incorporates blazing fast hardware, intuitive custom software, and proactive technical support into a one-stop solution.
With numerous staff and volunteers filming and ingesting media, the process of cataloging and backing up those video files can often get pushed off to a calmer time that never seems to arrive. For editors and producers, the sheer volume of all of this footage can render it, for all practical purposes, useless over the long term. Simply put, if you cannot find it when you need it, your team might as well not have filmed it.
With the introduction of Network-Attached Storage (NAS) solutions, enterprise-level media companies have been able to alleviate many of these issues by placing all media files on a single, centralized server that every member of a post-production team can access and edit directly from. While this solution is awesome in practice, until now it’s been economically impractical for most small- and mid-sized churches.
With the introduction of the creative.space //ROGUE from DigitalGlue, smaller production teams could now have an affordable NAS option for the first time. Designed for post-production teams ranging from 1-4 editing stations, the //ROGUE is a specialized data management device that incorporates blazing fast hardware, very intuitive custom software, and proactive technical support into a one-stop solution.
If DigitalGlue has found a way to thread that needle the creative.space //ROGUE could be just the solution church media teams have been looking for.
While we haven’t had the chance to get our hands on this system yet, this First Impression article will take a closer look at what the //ROGUE is all about.
One Part Hardware
On the hardware side, the creative.space //ROGUE is powered by an Intel Xeon Processor and features four hard drives distributed in a flexible RAID array. Depending on the specific user’s needs, this array allows for customized redundancy, performance and storage capacity options.
Both versions ship with two 10GbE Ethernet ports for high-speed editing, with two additional 1GbE Ethernet ports for editing or external VPN access. The server’s physical footprint is also small enough to be either incorporated into a desktop setup or to be utilized as an on-set DIT data management solution for ensuring media content is ingested and backed up right on site.
One Part Software
At the heart of the //ROGUE NAS is a suite of software apps designed to balance deep user-customization with the needs of non-technically minded creative users. A dedicated web app allows administrators to add user accounts and specify permissions for those accounts, while the Desktop app is provided for users to mount unique “Spaces” and bookmark files, folders, or Spaces for quick and easy access. These custom Spaces allow users to virtually manage both projects and server allocation as needed.
//ROGUE NAS is designed to balance deep user-customization with the needs of non-technically minded creative users.
In a feature reminiscent of Apple’s Time Machine, the “Snapshots” software keeps regular system logs, allowing operators to reset the server to previous moments in time, but with the ability to recover individual files and folders without having to roll back to an entire snapshot. This protects against user errors like accidentally removing media or overwriting project files. It also helps protect against ransomware attacks because the snapshots are encrypted for an added layer of security. The //ROGUE software also features advanced system diagnostics and monitoring, as well as enterprise-class self-healing and data-protection features.
And a Dash of Tech Support
Understanding that most //ROGUE users will lean more towards the creative side rather than the technical, DigitalGlue currently includes one year of tech support with the purchase of the NAS. This kind of support could be an invaluable feature when selecting your initial system setup, as well during the process of deploying VPN solutions for users accessing the server remotely.
The support team at DigitalGlue will also customize the performance of your system over time, ensuring your team gets the most out of the //ROGUE. The creative.space website also features a number of overview and walk-through videos for getting individual team members up and running with the NAS.
First Impression
As mentioned earlier, this is a First Impression of the creative.space //ROGUE; we haven’t yet had the chance to actually set it up and put it through its paces. But we expect to have our first review unit here in the next few weeks.
On the surface, the //ROGUE could be a Godsend for mid-sized film teams wanting to make a big step forward in the efficiency and effectiveness of the content they’re creating. The size of the investment also seems justifiable given how much it could increase the overall productivity of most film teams.
The starting price for the 48TB version is $199 per month or $4,795, with an expanded 64TB version for $265 per month or $6,395. While these prices are certainly aggressive for a full-featured NAS, media teams intent on purchasing a system would be wise to reach out to DigitalGlue to insure whether any additional upgrades might be needed to incorporate the NAS into your existing workflow.
Simply put, if you cannot find it when you need it, your team might as well not have filmed it.
From our perspective, one of the most pressing questions about the //ROGUE is how user-friendly the system will prove to be for team leaders with limited technical knowledge. If the learning curve is steep it could severely limit the utility of the system. On the other hand, if the custom software and tech support is as robust as we’re hoping, the //ROGUE could be exactly what church film leaders have been looking for.
