As a full-service production company, Mindfile Multimedia offers creative video production, motion graphics, and church livestream services to their diverse and loyal customer base. While they do just about everything, they excel in one thing above all else: creating killer content that engages, influences, and inspires. They’ve done just that for brands like PR Newswire, Sealed Air, and Siemens, as well as institutions like the New York Department of Education, St. Edwards School, and The Sunday Mass.
Father’s Message Goes Further with EVO
In 2015, Mindfile purchased their first EVO shared storage server, a 16 bay unit, to securely store their media for creative production. Since then, they have taken on bigger projects and inspired larger audiences with their live, branded, and narrative content.
“Our biggest project is probably our weekly televised Catholic mass. It is broadcast all over the world via cable and internet,” said James Curry, founder and CEO of Mindfile Multimedia.
“We also capture special events, and produce a church livestream series to extend the ministry to a wider audience online,” he added. “We generate a lot of content for worship services, and it’s all stored on our EVO server.”
The Sunday Mass weekly worship broadcast and their live production Through the Cross with Fr. Paul webcast series are both produced on-location using a NewTek TriCaster TC1 for live switching and recording. When paired with the NDI-enabled EVO shared storage server or NewTek Remote Storage—Powered by SNS, TriCaster systems can broadcast media directly from shared storage, record camera ISOs and NDI, and automatically store footage for editors’ immediate access. This enhanced live production workflow was purpose-built to meet the needs of the broadcast production community, such as church livestream, news media, and live sports.
“SNS’s development partnerships with NewTek and others reinforce that this was a great purchase five years ago,” said Curry. “We’ve grown a lot in that time, and so has the functionality of EVO. We are excited to expand our storage and take advantage of some of the new features that are available, like the enhanced workflows with TriCaster and working from home with SNS Nomad.”
A New Workflow in Record Time
Mindfile sought not only to expand their shared storage capacity with a new EVO system, but also to evolve from a SAN-based workflow into a more modern, automated, and collaborative IP-based workflow.
“Changing our workflow like this would normally take six months, but we’re making this transition in a much shorter timeframe with EVO,” said Curry.
With their new production workflow powered by EVO, Mindfile can take advantage of the full suite of media management and file automation tools that EVO offers:
- ShareBrowser media asset management software transforms the pre- and post-production process with powerful search, tag, and comment functionality. Creative teams can organize their files and search through volumes of media to find the perfect clip within seconds.
- Slingshot, EVO’s automations engine, automates replication and backup jobs without tedious manual input. Easily schedule and manage your automated tasks—such as daily file backups to Amazon S3 cloud storage—from the user-friendly EVO interface.
- Nomad, EVO’s remote editing utility, delivers proxy and source media from EVO to a remote workstation, facilitating offline editing workflows from any remote location.
Curry and his team are eager to explore the new world of possibilities with their improved workflow powered by EVO.
“Beyond improvements to our video production workflow, these new features are really making us rethink our whole business model. It’s incredible to see how technology has evolved in such a short time and the new opportunities it affords to companies like ours.”
“This is going to improve our full production workflow from pre-production to archive. Tagging, metadata generation, backups, remote access—it’ll all be synthesized in one area with EVO.”
“I am very much looking forward to ShareBrowser. It will help streamline our asset management process as we’ll be able to organize and categorize our media without having to go into another software.”
Real Estate Reimagined
Even before the pandemic, the close-knit team at Mindfile was changing their mind on how physically close they needed to work. As a Manhattan-based company, the overhead of their brick-and-mortar location is a significant investment, and with EVO’s remote editing tools, that investment may not need to be so hefty moving forward. The pandemic accelerated their transition to a collaborate-from-anywhere workflow, and their EVO included the features to make that happen.
“I’ll no longer need to bring in freelancers who are taking the subway to sit five feet apart in a small editing suite,” said Curry about EVO’s remote production capabilities. “With EVO and Nomad, we won’t need to have any editors physically present in the studio at all.”
Today, Mindfile has editors working from home in Queens, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and by the Jersey Shore. Using Nomad and SNS Cloud VPN, a cloud-hosted virtual private network service made exclusively for EVO, Mindfile can connect their post-production team to their shared storage media without losing the capabilities of a centralized workforce.
It’s more than just decreasing their real estate expenses, though. “The sky’s the limit,” said Curry. “I know some amazing visual artists and 3D modelers across the country that I’d love to work with and—with the remote aspect covered by our SNS products—I can add them to our freelance pool.”
Whether they are livestreaming a sermon from the church pews or cutting and coloring a television episode from home, Mindfile Multimedia relies on their EVO shared storage server to create their engaging, influential, and inspiring content, faster.
To learn more about EVO shared media storage servers and our live production workflow solutions, schedule a personalized demo today.