Georgetown University is a prestigious institution located in the heart of Washington, D.C. Their list of alumni features many high-ranking political officials, ranging from U.S. Supreme Court judges to former Presidents, and other world leaders. So it’s no surprise that Georgetown students are some of the most politically active in the country. Many of them are highly driven to make a difference in the world, and Georgetown pushes them to do so. The history at Georgetown University is rich and there are many stories to tell — inside the Office of Strategic Communications, that’s their mission.
Ramping up video production to reach students
Video plays a significant role in strengthening the university’s brand. With the access that they have to Washington D.C, high-caliber guest speakers are a regular occurrence. Each one of these presentations gets recorded by the Office of Strategic Communications and shared with the world.
Aside from speaking events, professor interviews, and other academic videos, Georgetown is also creating narrative videos that they use to inspire students across campus. The success they’ve seen with this strategy has led them to increase their productions, and with that, their need for a reliable shared storage system and a proper media asset management solution also increased.
“We were recording hundreds of hours of footage and just storing it on external hard drives that we passed back and forth when we needed to copy and share media. As the team grew, we knew that we needed a way to find footage quickly and share it without having to transfer drives from editor to editor and bringing the editorial process to a halt,” said Emma Curran, Videographer at Georgetown University’s Office of Strategic Communications.
Emma and her team started looking for a way to manage the constant flow of media coming to them as they started taking on projects for other departments around Georgetown. The external drives were slowing them down to a halt — copying files and trying to locate media was causing them to waste hundreds of hours per year. They needed something more efficient.
Reliable and easy-to-use shared storage
The team at Georgetown realized that there was an immediate need for a shared storage server for video, but Curran wasn’t exactly sure where to start looking.
“I went on a massive research campaign and started calling other schools and talking to colleagues. Eventually, we’d heard so many great things about EVO that we decided to call SNS.”
Emma and her team shoot in AVCHD and edit the footage natively inside Adobe Premiere Pro, which they’ve chosen for its flexibility and integration with After Effects and other Creative Cloud apps. Now, with ShareBrowser, the media asset management software included with EVO, every editor connected to the server can search for footage based on user-entered tags and comments, and instantly find the shot they are looking for. Then, importing that media is as simple as loading it into Premiere and starting an edit.
“We needed something simple that allowed us to work the way we wanted to work, and that let us organize and share media with multiple editors. EVO is incredibly reliable, and the software is easy to use. We don’t ever have to worry about performance or slowdowns while we’re editing,” said Emma.
Once footage gets ingested, an editor will scrub the footage and start making tags and comments to clips based on the contents of the shot, like the subjects, locations, and other relevant descriptions.
Time saved is time earned
Now, Emma and her team have a level of organization provided by network storage and media asset management that has lead to massive improvements in their video workflow.
“Having EVO as a central storage location for everyone has been crucial to our productivity,” comments Emma. The amount of time the team has saved by eliminating tedious searching and copying alone is over 200 hours per year. That amounts to money saved for Georgetown, and it also allows Emma and her team to create great content, faster.
Since implementing the EVO shared storage server, the department has been able to take on more projects from other departments within the university. They’ve implemented a fee-for-service model where they take projects that would normally get contracted to agencies and third parties, and instead, they produce and edit them in house. It costs a fraction of what outsourcing costs; it keeps the money within the organization and helps them continue to grow their department.
Georgetown made an investment in video. Thanks to the creative team inside the Office of Strategic Communications, and thanks to the workflow provided by EVO and ShareBrowser, that investment will continue to pay off.
“EVO is an investment in the future of our team. As our department continues to expand, we know that we have a reliable and seamless solution that grows and evolves with us.”
If you want to improve your organization’s media workflow, contact us to get a free demo of EVO shared storage and ShareBrowser media asset management software.