(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)
Crossroads Christian Church, located in Evansville, IN, runs an almost entirely Mac network. They have close to 30 Macs (as well as five Wintel systems) and currently use three Mac servers, according to Media Pastor Dan Hendricks. And you know what sort of systems they use for video, don’t you?
“Four years ago I was wanting to venture into the world of video editing,” Hendricks told MacCentral. “Apple had just released Final Cut Pro, and it was exactly what I was looking for. Today, we produce two to three videos each week. We have four Mac workstations set up with Final Cut Pro and several iMacs that use iMovie. Several of our high school students have captured the vision of video editing and produce many of the products for our Youth Ministry department by themselves.”
He said he gets an average of one phone call a week wanting advice on how to get started with video editing. Most are primarily PC users.
“I try to get them to see the benefits of the Mac and Final Cut Pro,” Hendricks said. “I wish I could say that a large number of them choose Mac systems, but I do know that at least a half dozen churches that have bought Mac systems after our recommendations. Most of them use their machines in their media departments, primarily for video editing. As for us, we love our Macs.”
Crossroads Christian Church’s Media Department switched to Mac OS X at the first of the year. They use GoLive 6.0 for their Web page, Photoshop 7.0 for graphics, InDesign 2.0 for page layout, and Final Cut Pro 3.0 for editing. All of their video projects are now burned to DVD with iDVD. They also use Cleaner 5 to compress audio of the pastor’s messages and compress video projects for posting on the internet.
Alas, not all organizations have such good experiences with technology. When a high school in Grass Valley, CA, went Wintel the number of computers on campus doubled — but the number of tech support staff tripled (from two to six) and “up-time” has shrunk with up to half the PCs non-functional at any given time.
The school had been pressured to dump Macs for years, according to one person close to the situation that spoke with MacCentral. There are approximately 30 Macs on campus, but they’ve received no support.
“In fact, the techs have insisted that teachers who use Macs install security software at their own expense,” he said. “This makes them unattractive to teachers … but some Mac users have persisted. But now that the system has gone mostly Wintel, viruses and hacks have brought the entire system down for two-day stretches twice this year alone.”
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