Small Tree streamlines productions for Wheaton Bible Church
Published: WORSHIP
WORLD: Wheaton Bible Church in Chicago has enlisted Small Tree for assistance with streamlining technical productions. The church produces its own media content to maximise engagement with the congregation, accumulating an abundance of raw footage along the way. With consultation provided by Serial Scene, the solution provided lets the technical staff manipulate footage simultaneously, helping the team meet its tight deadlines.
The church has a congregation of nearly 4,000 members spread across several different ministries. To create its own content it captures video with a DLSR camera and edits the footage with Adobe Creative Suite and Final Cut Pro. With the large amount of footage being created, and because of the very tight deadlines it works to, it needed an alternative to swapping files across its workstations via USB hard drives.
Shelton Thompson, technical director at Wheaton, reached out to Small Tree’s partner Serial Scene to provide consultation, system design and installation for a new shared storage system, settling on Small Tree’s GraniteSTOR Titanium8.
‘Our operation is far more efficient since installing the Titanium,’ stated Ms Thompson. ‘We’re not waiting on files to load in and out to keep our workflow moving. Most of our projects are last minute and we have to turn them around quickly to be ready for viewing, whether it’s for one of our services or our website.’
A total of eight workstations consisting of iMacs, Macbook Pros, Mac Pros and a PC are connected to the Titanium8, with Wheaton’s editing team reportedly very impressed by the system’s simplicity and performance.
‘We have so many people that can be jumping in and working on a video project – including a lot of volunteers – so it was important to have a solid solution that everyone could use,’ Ms Thompson continued. ‘On the performance side, we have a lot of raw footage, so Small Tree’s shared storage has been great for centralising everything, bringing that cataloguing feature we needed to find files quickly and access simultaneously.’