Jellyfish Server Brings New Life to Video Production at SoCal’s Harvest Church
When Harvest Christian Fellowship decided to shoot its massive outreach events in 4K, its video production team turned to OWC Jellyfish for fast and reliable access to their footage.
Wayne Grayson • Feb 27, 2024
Though Harvest Christian Fellowship’s history stretches back nearly 50 years, the church’s methods are very much “with the times.”
Lead pastor and founder Greg Laurie has embraced technology and media as an effective tool to share the church’s message with thousands of church members in Riverside, California, and millions of people around the world.
In addition to keeping Laurie’s YouTube page—which has more than 500,000 subscribers and more than 2,000 videos—up-to-date with his latest messages and sermons from the pulpit at Harvest, the video staff at Harvest are also integral in the production of the annual Harvest Crusade.
The Harvest Crusade is one of the largest and longest-running evangelistic outreach programs in America. Each year, tens of thousands of attendees fill large Southern California venues such as Angels Stadium in Anaheim, to take part in worship concerts and hear sermons.
For the latest edition of the Harvest Crusade, Harvest video production supervisor Ken Sanders says the church wanted to film the event in a more cinematic way, upgrading to 4K cameras.
This meant cameras that would generate a lot more data, necessitating an upgrade to Harvest’s production infrastructure. After consulting with OWC, Harvest decided to upgrade to a Jellyfish server.
The OWC Jellyfish family of shared storage solutions represents the ultimate in Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions purpose-built for video professionals. Harvest opted for the Jellyfish Tower which supports up to 360TB of raw storage capacity. Thanks to 1GbE / 10GbE / 25GbE / 50GbE connections, Jelyfish Tower allows for 16+ editors to work with 4K media and beyond simultaneously.
Sanders and Harvest lead video editor Kevin Phelps says the impact of the Jellyfish Tower on the production staff’s workflow has been dramatic.
“The Jellyfish server enables all of our editors to seamlessly work ont he same project on different systems,” Phelps says. “It streamlines our workflow. It would be 10 times slower to do our job without it.”
Sanders says the plug-and-play nature of the Jellyfish and its powerful network abilities allow editors to focus on the message and stories they want to tell rather than on setup and troubleshooting.
“It has allowed us to connect people with the content we’re producing,” Sanders says.
