Faith Family Church Installs Small Tree Titanium16 Shared Storage

At Faith Family Church in Victoria, TX,
what began in 1979 as a small group of believers gathered in a living room has
blossomed into a church with an active and engaged congregation of nearly 3,000
members, as well as a weekly show, ‘Life at its Best,’ broadcast
locally.

As Faith Family continues to grow, so do the demands placed on the church’s
production team to provide content to the church’s devoted followers.

To
alleviate workflow for its editing team, the church recently installed a Small
Tree Titanium16 Ethernet-based shared storage system featuring 48TBs over
10GbE. Prior to switching to the Titanium16, Faith Family’s post-production
professionals were handling projects via sneaker-net, a solution that had
become cumbersome for the editors.

Additionally, with the potential for taking
its weekly show national, the church’s technical director, Joshua Hubble,
realized that they would need to consolidate all of their assets to improve
efficiencies.

"We were sharing files from computer to
computer and would have multiple versions across multiple systems,"
Hubble said. "With an eye toward a
national network broadcast, we had to find a way to bring everything together,
audio and video, instead of using the old sneaker-net system where you just
grab a hard drive and walk down the hall. Small Tree’s shared storage has
helped us refine our workflow by organizing all of the files and ensuring that
all of the editors sync the same way."

Titanium is a capacity dense, dedicated video editing shared storage appliance with
file sharing capabilities enabling real-time collaboration. It
is a 3U rack-mount solution configurable up to 20 GbE or 12 10GbE ports and
storage capacity from 32TB to 320TB, while delivering up to 72 streams of
ProRes 422.

After the installation of Small Tree’s Titanium16, the post-production team at
Faith Family is experiencing fewer workstation problems as a result of
offloading large content files to the server.

According to Hubble, shifting
from the FireWire drives has also been of great benefit for meeting tight
deadlines with peace of mind.

"Some
of the drives weren’t quite as fast or you would have a drive fail and lose
data," Hubble remarked. "We
haven’t lost anything since installing the Titanium16. On top of that, our
editors have been able to work faster and share things more easily."

Responsible for editing audio, as well as
overall project management, Hubble has been impressed and pleased with a number
of benefits resulting from the Titanium16.

"Before installing the Small Tree system, we
would spend a good day to a day and a half of transferring data to drives,"
Hubble concluded. "So the biggest
benefit for me is to be able to handle audio post-production from my
workstation while managing the project from a single file that everyone has
access to. As a result, we’ve probably shortened the post process by a day."