By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
For years, the production team at Wave Church in Virginia Beach, Va., battled content storage inefficiencies. Multiple servers created chaos and disruption. A lack of remote access limited the content they could produce. Nickel-and-dime pricing for the features they needed created anxiety and uncertainty.
Altogether, this made it tough for Production/Communications Director Steve Tignor and his staff to produce the high-quality content that was not just needed, but that they were passionate about creating.
Then, a game-changing alternative emerged — one that saves them tens of thousands of dollars a year. One that’s much easier to use and highly accessible (even remotely). A solution that accommodates 400% more content and ramps up the speed of content production by at
least 30%.
It wasn’t too good to be true. Here’s how.
Nearly 10 years ago, Wave Church made the jump to using a studio-quality storage area network, or SAN — basically, a large, expensive hard drive.
“We had to have it,” recalls Production/Communications Director Steve Tignor. “For the things we were doing — producing a lot of content, and even a TV show — speed is everything.”
To start, the team got to work ‘digitizing everything,’ according to Tignor. “We moved all our content off of DVDs and other forms of storage, like Dropbox,” he recalls. This included rooms full of videotapes dating back to 1999.
In the end, they wound up with four workstations providing access to every file a team member might need … but they really had to work for it. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) was set up to share files; however, it was slow.
“It was more like file-browsing, not necessarily being able to work on a project,” Tignor says. “It was a lot of what we didn’t need; it probably added more headaches. We were making do with a workflow that didn’t match what we were trying to achieve.”
On the one hand, it was better than the previous approach: adding one hard drive after another, with a big price tag each time. That, and incorporating Dropbox for storage, as many churches do, which created even more chaos and disorganization.
Then came COVID
“We had to get letters for our team to be able to travel into the office, in case we got pulled over by police during the quarantine,” Tignor recalls. “That’s when it really started becoming a problem. No one was in this building except for us.”
Once the pandemic passed, the team’s travel schedule further complicated matters. While in different cities shooting interviews, for example, they were unable to access other projects to work on in their down time. Ideally, the team would have a platform that enabled them to work on projects remotely and access and edit content — including full-length videos — from anywhere.
Their then-current setup was far from perfect, but as far as Tignor and his team knew, it was the best they could do.
A trip to the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB) in 2023 would change that.
A new, improved approach emerges
“Going to NAB, I was pretty much on a mission to find a better content storage solution,” Tignor recalls. One of the first stops was the church’s current vendor.
“Everything they said was pretty much ‘same old, same old,’” he says. “We learned that it would cost X more to add this or that basic feature for the things we wanted to do, which just wasn’t in the budget.”
Dismayed but not discouraged, the Wave Church team spotted RED Digital Cinema cameras in use at another booth: DigitalGlue. Because the church uses these same cameras, they were drawn in. They soon learned about creative.space, a shared storage platform for video teams.
“For them to show that creative.space can handle RED content was huge,” Tignor says. “That’s a high level of content; it demands a lot of data.”
Product Manager Nick Anderson walked the Wave Church team through the workflow. “Our guys loved it,” Tignor recalls. “And then he told me the price.”
At first, it seemed too good to be true.
“It was so much cheaper than any other solution we’d found,” Tignor recalls. “I was like, Wow, that’s crazy. I don’t even know how you’re doing that.”
More demos followed. A few months later, Tignor was a true believer. He ordered creative.space.
Onboarding made simple
A third-party IT company was hired to get creative.space set up and rolled out. By all accounts, it was much smoother than anyone anticipated.
“Onboarding was super easy; there was no challenges that DigitalGlue couldn’t handle in that regard,” Tignor says. “Customer service was fast, quick, and very proactive, which was different. Instead of us reaching out, they were always checking in.”
In fact, he says, any headaches originated with the IT company that was hired to set up the solution. “Fortunately, though, DigitalGlue would send someone out to help them get it all set up,” Tignor points out.
So, with creative.space up and running, the Wave Church production team got to work, enjoying four times more storage capacity than before. They quickly began to appreciate features like user management, templates, tagging and much more.
“In my world, prior to creative.space, my team said it took a lot of time to find certain content,” he explains. This was because content was previously stored using a folder system. Tignor explains: “When we recorded something or took a photo, it wouldn’t instantly add, ‘Here’s Pastor Steve’ to the data; this information had to be manually input. So, being able to create these tagging systems [within creative.space] really speeds up the search process.”
This souped-up search functionality has been especially helpful as Wave Church hosts a variety of preachers at multiple campuses. “We have all different types of testimonies, conferences and events, so it just allows for structure,” Tignor explains. “We can still use the folder system, but the search parameters are much more targeted. Once we got it laid out, it made everything so much smoother and faster.”
Tignor also says that creative.space’s remote connectivity and VPN system is “super user-friendly.”
“We have lots of volunteers, so there are photographers at all of our campuses,” he explains. “With other content management and storage solutions, it could get unorganized, cluttered, and become overwhelming really quickly if lots of people were gaining access to it.”
Not so with creative.space.
With the server housed in the main campus, these users connect to creative.space through a VPN. User profiles make it simple to manage all the different contributors, from low-level volunteers to high-level ones.
“It’s super simple to add, remove, change permissions for people, give them whatever access they want,” Tignor says. “That means all the relevant volunteers can have access to the server, and we don’t have to worry about it crashing.”
These are just a few of the features that only come at an extra cost from other content storage providers, according to Tignor.
“With another platform we used, features like this were part of a separate software package that we had to pay for and needed a different license to use,” he points out. “But creative.space is an all-in-one platform, which is far more affordable.”
Savings, scalability sweeten the deal
Today, Tignor’s team estimates that rendering times have improved by at least 30%. As mentioned before, they can even access those video files dating back to 1999. This functionality comes in very useful when the team is called to produce legacy pieces.
“That’s when we need a lot of this older content,” he says. “Instead of having to scroll through hours and hours of tape looking for snippets of things in the past, we’re able to just type in a few notes and find it so much faster.”
For the purposes of cost consistency, Wave Church chose a 5-year service-based agreement with creative.space. This is a big departure from what it was doing before.
“Again, in the world of servers, I was often frustrated by having to pay extra: for licensing, for updates — we just paid for everything, constantly,” Tignor explains. “And if we wanted the customer service side, we had to pay for that, too.”
Today, the picture is very different.
“The price for creative.space was amazing, and I wanted it locked in,” Tignor reiterates. “At first, I was a little nervous that we were getting entry-level pricing and that it would eventually double. I mean, we were saving $15,000 annually through creative.space compared to our other options!”
But that price hike has never materialized — and this has delivered tangible, real-world ministry benefits.
“These savings have opened up our budget to be able to do a lot more — to invest in camera equipment and so on,” Tignor says. “In that regard, it has been phenomenal.”
The scalability of the creative.space platform was another selling point.
“I knew instantly that if we needed more storage at some point, it would be easy to do,” Tignor says. “It’s pretty simple; when we get to a certain point, we can just re-evaluate our plan. Then, DigitalGlue will send out a whole new server or more hard drives. We’ll add it to our annual cost — which should be easy, since we’re saving about $60,000 over five years.”
All this, compared to buying a new server at $35,000 to $40,000 apiece when storage is maxed out, makes a compelling case.
Support when they need it
With a few years of using creative.space under his belt, Tignor credits DigitalGlue’s work with other churches as a big reason why it works so well in these environments. First and foremost: proactive customer service.
“A lot of times, they’ll fix the issue before you get into the office or even know about it,” Tignor says. “I think a lot of that is because of their business model; technically, it’s still their server and we’re leasing it.”
For example, in the event of a power outage, Tignor might arrive on a Sunday at 7 a.m. knowing exactly what he’s walking into — or not, since the issue might already be solved. The same applies to hard drive issues and more. He and his team can rest assured that the content on the server is intact and uncompromised.
“Another thing I love about their customer service is, they want open feedback about how to make this an even better product,” Tignor adds. “They’re always asking, ‘How can we improve X feature?’ As a customer, I just feel like their openness to that type of feedback is pretty awesome.
“They’re also not so big that you’re just kind of sent into the customer service ‘system’, like some of these other companies that we looked at,” he adds. “It’s a lot more personal. And they understand churches.”
The net result is higher-quality output, produced faster, at a much better price.
“Buying a media server is such an annoying thing to spend money on,” Tignor concludes. “I’d much rather buy lenses for our cameras or new lights — things where people can actually see the improvements.
“So yeah, all things considered, committing to that five-year contract was an easy decision,” he adds. “And overall, the quality of our content is better.”
