I'm fully aware that many of you who have just started a video ministry will not have the budget to afford a multiple terabyte computer based video storage array or solutions based on Final Cut server, especially since most of you are still going to be recording church services with a single camera onto DV tape.
What I'm talking about is thinking about what system you are going to be using to label, store and index your tapes, and the DVDs that you will start accumulating as the video department starts to get involved in the church's business. If you needed a copy of the message that was preached by a guest minister on a sunday morning one year ago, would you be able to tell if it was video recorded, if it was, where is the tape, and is it possible to make use of the footage?
Other things you need to be thinking about is where will you keep all the tapes? In a church member's house, what about the issues of advancing in technology, when you change camera's and upgrade will you still be able to access old footage, when should you start to put your media into the digital format, what format, compression, etc.
Just as I'm asking you these questions, I'm thinking about the same for my church as well, so I don't have all the answers at the moment, but I do know that we have to improve on our current church video library, which partly consists of labelled boxes of DV tapes and some digital media stored on portable USB hard drives.
Obviously the day will come when we will be able to use a computerised solution maybe based on Final Cut Server, since we currently use Apple Macs and Final Cut Express/Pro for editing, but with or without this, there will always be a need to locate and use old church video footage and the easier it is to locate, the better for your department.
