Picture this: It’s Saturday night, you're relaxing after dinner and about to put the kids to bed when you get a text from your senior pastor who wants to make “one small change” to a video you’ll be running as part of this Sunday’s services. It’s not an ideal time to jump in the car and get over to the church to make the edits. What’s worse is that the change pastor wants is to include the “killer” introduction that you edited for a video a few years ago. Luckily you remember working on it back then, and he loved it, but now you’re racking your brain to remember what drive volume that might be on. You’re starting to think that this could turn into a long night.
EditShare builds network shared storage and media management solutions powering smart workflows for the media and entertainment industry.
This is not an uncommon scenario and one that is played out regularly where a friendly archival system and secure remote access is not available to church media teams. Fortunately, times are changing.
Media-savvy audiences require engaging content, increasing demands on media creatives who use ever-evolving production tools.
Working Smarter
It is hard to fully comprehend all the challenges that today’s media creatives face. In a world where technology is evolving faster than ever to meet the demands of media-savvy audiences, media creatives are called upon to leverage often new and changing technology into art in order to turn a vision into the reality of an engaging finished production. Media teams in our houses of worship are no exception. Especially in recent months, churches have turned to their media creatives to find new ways to deliver the message. For many churches, it has been the media team keeping church in the lives of the congregation, and in many cases expanding online services to reach new worshipers.
CarolLangewisch
Using EditShare, video can be accessed and edited using any computer on the network at Northwoods Community Church in Peoria, IL.
Among recent changes, the Internet now figures prominently in the workflows of today’s church media teams as both a medium to reach worshipers, as well as an overarching work environment for creatives who are more frequently called upon to collaborate remotely. Some of the updated and new Internet-aware media tools are those built specifically for editing and distribution; still others offer new concepts for storage efficiency and smarter media management. All are important, but understanding and prioritizing tools that work together is well worth the effort. Focusing on efficient tools that can promote better workflows for church media teams can not only improve productions, but also can simplify recurring processes, reduce stress, and take a media ministry into the future.
One forward-looking company, EditShare headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, has been building network shared storage and media management solutions for the media and entertainment industry since 2004. Their forward-looking, high-performance shared storage, archiving, and backup software is optimized for media, but efficient storage is just one part of the integrated solution that’s enabled by EditShare’s advanced suite of media management tools. Taken together or as part of a hybrid solution, these tools lay out a framework for better collaboration, smarter workflows, and greater efficiency that can all be tailored specifically to fit your church’s live productions, post production, event coverage, and education.
Open Storage
In our opening scenario, it wasn’t production skills or lack of tools that plagued our producer. It was his concern about digging out the content he knew he had somewhere and his having to go physically to the data and his editing tools to work. EditShare offers a software-defined ecosystem of powerful storage solutions and easy remote connectivity that could have kept him in his home office.
... EFS storage integrates seamlessly with industry-leading creative tools from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, BlackMagic and others to create a multi-collaboration environment.
EditShare’s storage solution, EFS, works across hardware to provide a single namespace that eliminates the need to manage multiple storage volumes. Additional capacity can simply be added to EFS when needed, and the system ‘rebalances’ the distribution of files over the new space–from a single storage node to an expansive cluster. Having scalability designed into the system eliminates the snags and overhead that church media teams endure when adding to traditional storage.
A clear benefit of supporting an open platform is that EFS storage integrates seamlessly with industry-leading creative tools from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, BlackMagic and others to create a multi-collaboration environment. Users are free to use the tool that fits them or the project best. EFS drivers are native for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems which reduces latency across the network (critical for creative applications), as well as support key protocols, like SMB, NFS and AFP. Administrators can easily control user permissions, project security, enforce storage quotas, and see complete details of user actions on files and directories, all through a friendly web-based user interface.
For churches getting away from physical media, EditShare offers EFSv, a flexible “cloud native” storage solution. This can extend video production and media management to private cloud storage environments, including AWS, Tencent Cloud and other public and private cloud environments.
Media Management that Flows
A powerful archival system would have helped our at-home editor find that “killer” intro he needed for Sunday, but his ability to use his editing tools of choice remotely could have saved the day, or in his case, salvaged the remainder of a peaceful night at home to rest up for Sunday morning. EditShare’s FLOW Media Management was designed to do just that–enable a full-featured environment for remote video and audio editing.
... team members can work in Premiere Pro, Resolve, Media Composer or Final Cut Pro with full asset tracking from anywhere, working remotely the same way they would in their “at work” editing bay and even collaborating with colleagues in real time over the network.
The FLOW media management suite works with any non-linear editing software with full asset tracking and native drag-and-drop with no transcoding necessary. So team members could be working in Premiere Pro, Resolve, Media Composer or Final Cut Pro with full asset tracking from anywhere, working remotely the same way they would in their “at work” editing bay and even collaborating with colleagues in real time over the network. All needed project data, such as sequences, clips, bin, and markers, are transferred transparently through a secure interface.
One can think of EditShare’s FLOW as a powerful central management tool for all of a church’s media that thoughtfully aligns the industry’s top editing and post production tools into a naturally flowing, productive workflow. This is ideal for fast-turnaround environments, delivery on tight schedules, and can greatly simplify setting up collaborations when outside help might be needed.
FLOW offers the ability to quickly orchestrate and automate workflows, thereby removing human repetitive tasks like copying, moving, deleting, transcoding, and organizing projects or media spaces. For example, FLOW can trigger simple or complex processes at regular times of day, during the week, or based on specific user actions. It’s easy to see how churches might immediately benefit from building out specific workflows for their regularly recurring projects, automating backups to the cloud, and delivering content.
... smarter workflows can help church media teams get more done and free them to work more creatively to tell the story of the church.
Integration and More
EditShare’s FLOW can help church teams in building and tailoring workflows, but its open design takes it further for churches with specific integration needs with a full set of robust APIs (an Application Program Interface library). EditShare also can take content searching to a new level with FLOW’s AI logging and transcription capabilities that can automatically transcribe and tag large blocks of content to aid future search and retrieval. And used together, EFS and FLOW support “edit while capture” scenarios which could be invaluable in turning around live church productions quickly.
The individual components of the EditShare suite offer the latest in advanced storage and remote access ability that would have helped out our stuck-at-home media producer from our opening, but EditShare’s real power for churches may lie in the suite’s ability to tailor smart, integrated workflows within a framework that can prioritize collaboration, and remove much of the inherent complexity that plagues traditional media production.
Media tools for building smarter workflows can help church media teams to get more done and free them to work more creatively to tell the story of the church.
