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EVO Empowers Creative Ministry at Church by the Glades

Hyper-creative and fully charged. That’s a tagline fit for a cutting-edge production studio, an avant-garde dance company, or the newest installation at a metropolitan art museum. Or, as it turns out, for a church.

Yes… a church.

With six, south Florida campuses, including two in correctional facilities, Church by the Glades (CBG) welcomes upwards of 9,000 people to their weekend worship gatherings. Combined with their live, online experiences and television broadcast initiatives, CBG has an enormous reach to an extraordinarily diverse audience.

cbglades-silhouette

But, What’s Creativity Have to Do With Church?

“Church here is a like a caffeine punch in the face,” says CBG’s Film Team Director, Mauricio Tinoco. “[Lead Pastor David Hughes] really believes that church should be fun and engaging. We have the greatest message ever told. And we need to tell it really well. Practically, what that means is we’re going to try and mine culture… and do something that’s going to help engage people.”

What kind of something? Browse CBG’s YouTube channel, and you’ll find culturally relevant message series fully supported by captivating art and advanced technology. In addition, Tinoco and his team — which includes four paid staff people and a swarm of volunteers and interns — produce four, weekly television episodes. All told, CBG cranks out an average of seven projects every week, all of it in a team context. “We have almost no projects that pass through just one set of hands,” Tinoco explains.” It’s super collaborative. That’s something that EVO makes possible.”

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When Tinoco first arrived at CBG in April 2016 and got a look at his new team’s set-up — a cabinet jammed with stacks of 2.5″ SATA drives — his reaction was, “Are you guys serious?”

EVO: Making Things Possible

Although CBG did have a shared server, it was cobbled-together, they couldn’t edit off it, there were no naming conventions, and it was maddeningly slow. Plus, every computer operated independently on its own 8 TB mini-RAID, enough to store only three weeks’ worth of material. Why was that a problem? Periodic recap videos are a staple of vibrant congregations, and Tinoco knew they’d be sunk if Pastor Hughes were to request one. Assuming they could even find the clips, it would take hours and hours to transfer footage to begin the editing process.

Tinoco immediately went searching for a new solution, and he had two non-negotiable features at the top of his wish list: storage space and speed. He found both, and much more, in the 128 TB EVO 16 Bay. In addition to its ministry-on-a-budget-friendly price tag, he found EVO’s search capabilities, shared editing features, seamless software integration, and simple administration (no IT director required) impressive. “I was almost shocked at how easy it was to get it up and running. As far as separating it out into workspaces and setting up user privileges, it was incredibly simple.”

And about that recap video…

Pastor Hughes did request one. And CBG’s film team turned it around in eight days–from concept to completion. “Gathering footage was the easiest part because it was all in one place. It was easy to get to. … While I’m editing one highlight reel, I had three volunteers on other stations finding more clips. As soon as they finished, they’d holler from the other room, ‘Hey, Mo, you want to grab this footage, and I would just pull it over. Before we had EVO, something like that would not have been possible in that amount of time.”

Margin for More

With a suite of six iMac workstations running Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, EVO is a reliable, speedy, intuitive partner for CBG’s Film Team. The benefits extend beyond simple stress reduction. “It’s an investment. The amount of margin EVO created for us and the way it’s made us efficient is just unreal,” Tinoco explains. “I can’t go out and hire another staff person, so what I’ve got to do is work on training my guys, and we’ve got to work on sharpening our skill set. Having that margin enables us to do that. We’re not having to sit in the office, waiting for hard drives to copy or hunt them down.”

EVO will also allow CBG’s film team to grow their ministry by adding more emotionally compelling narrative work. Although that will require bringing on additional team members in the future, TInoco isn’t concerned. “I think we’re barely using half of the amount of connections we can make… we could easily add four more team members and still be able to run with the server the way it is. It’s been a great tool.”

About Studio Network Solutions (SNS)

SNS shared storage solutions are at the core of optimized video workflow for professional content creation workgroups worldwide. The SNS EVO shared media storage server combines high-performance with extensive connectivity, including 10Gb/s Ethernet and Fibre Channel. With EVO’s included ShareBrowser asset management software, you can search, index, preview, tag, and verify video and project assets with no additional software required. NAS, SAN, or both at the same time, EVO is designed for online real-time video editing with leading video/audio applications including Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro/CC, Final Cut Pro (FCP), Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), DaVinci Resolve, Pro Tools, and others.

Read more user stories or contact SNS now to see how the EVO shared media storage server can help your company.