AlphaDogs Finishes "Ben Hur" & "Unbearable Lightness" DVDs

AlphaDogs Inc. announced that it has completed work on two DVD projects for Leva FilmWorks, Ben Hur Collector's Edition four-disc set and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. AlphaDogs finished post for the main titles, graphics and color correction.

Work on The Unbearable Lightness of Being DVD (Filmed in 1988 starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche) included animating parts of the Emotional Memory documentary. Russell Frazier, AlphaDogs vice president of graphics technologies, chose reflection as a visual motif from the film and animated scenes from the movie in spinning, reflected panels that pass by like fleeting memories.

The Ben Hur DVD starring Charlton Heston includes documentaries, audio commentary and other special features. Frazier's graphic work on this project included slowing and separating the iconic image of the chariot in motion from the film and presenting it against the monumental, frescoed style of the film's titles.

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About AlphaDogs

Founded in 2002, Burbank-based AlphaDogs, Inc. quickly established themselves as leaders and innovators in the rapidly changing digital post arena. The company maintains an early adopters edge; testing and assimilating leading technologies to keep ahead of the pack with solutions such as the RED camera and were the first post house in Los Angeles to take delivery of the Avid Symphony HD editing system. Personal attention from a seasoned award-winning team assures client satisfaction accompanies each cost-effective delivery of superior post production services—from editing and audio re-recording to broadcast design & effects.

AlphaDogs is home to the popular Editors' Lounge and headquarters of the growing media transfer specialty service Digital Service Station; now serving California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. AlphaDogs is located at 1612 West Olive, Suite 200, Burbank, CA 91506.

Visit the AlphaDogs team on the web: www.alphadogs.tv.

AlphaDogs Onlines TLC's "Bringing Home Baby"

AlphaDogs Inc. announced that Norsemen Television Productions LLC and The Learning Channel (TLC) contracted the studio to online Bringing Home Baby, a reality series that documents parents' first 36 hours at home with their new baby.

Bringing Home Baby requires multiple work stations for media capture, online color correction and total conform from Avid® offlined shows. To streamline the video online process, AlphaDogs opted to use a shared storage solution to stay on schedule and within budget for the 60 episode series.

The post-house draws on the advanced storage solutions of TerraBlock™ from Facilis. TerraBlock is a virtual-volume, high-performance SAN solution that combines intelligent drive management software with lower-cost SATA drive technology and dedicated optical fiber channel connectivity.

AlphaDogs uses TerraBlock because of its cross platform compatibility with Apple and PCs and its raid protection for mission critical media. In addition, all users can have access to common elements such as graphics and series specific effects bins by setting up a simple file/volume structure. It is possible to simultaneously online one episode while another episode is being captured and prepped.

Even with AlphaDogs' Fibre patch bay moving content between local storage drives, it takes approximately 15 minutes for transfer. Multiply 15 minutes by the number of times per day media needs to be shared and the cost in man and machine hours adds up quickly, not to mention downing two rooms for 15 minutes to swap media cuts into productive editing time.

The Bringing Home Baby type of workflow would not be practical in a local storage environment where it is necessary to power down computers and drives in order to move media between different systems.

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About AlphaDogs

Founded in 2002, Burbank-based AlphaDogs, Inc. quickly established themselves as leaders and innovators in the rapidly changing digital post arena. The company maintains an early adopters edge; testing and assimilating leading technologies to keep ahead of the pack with solutions such as the RED camera and were the first post house in Los Angeles to take delivery of the Avid Symphony HD editing system. Personal attention from a seasoned award-winning team assures client satisfaction accompanies each cost-effective delivery of superior post production services—from editing and audio re-recording to broadcast design & effects.

AlphaDogs is home to the popular Editors' Lounge and headquarters of the growing media transfer specialty service Digital Service Station; now serving California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. AlphaDogs is located at 1612 West Olive, Suite 200, Burbank, CA 91506.

Visit the AlphaDogs team on the web: www.alphadogs.tv.

Alpha Expansion

Burbank post-production studio AlphaDogs has enhanced its post-production capabilities with a second online audio bay, bringing the studio's total full-mix edit bays to five. Each audio bay runs on an AppleR Power Mac G5 with dual 2 Ghz processors and includes Pro Tools HD2 Accel, Waves Platinum Bundle Plug-In Pack, Dynaudio 5.1 Monitoring Systems (speakers) and Dorrough Metering 50 inch Sony HD televisions.

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About AlphaDogs

Founded in 2002, Burbank-based AlphaDogs, Inc. quickly established themselves as leaders and innovators in the rapidly changing digital post arena. The company maintains an early adopters edge; testing and assimilating leading technologies to keep ahead of the pack with solutions such as the RED camera and were the first post house in Los Angeles to take delivery of the Avid Symphony HD editing system. Personal attention from a seasoned award-winning team assures client satisfaction accompanies each cost-effective delivery of superior post production services—from editing and audio re-recording to broadcast design & effects.

AlphaDogs is home to the popular Editors' Lounge and headquarters of the growing media transfer specialty service Digital Service Station; now serving California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. AlphaDogs is located at 1612 West Olive, Suite 200, Burbank, CA 91506.

Visit the AlphaDogs team on the web: www.alphadogs.tv.

Reality TV Keeping AlphaDogs Busy

AlphaDogs has been busy providing online services for a number of popular reality series produced and directed by Pilgrim Films & Television, Inc. American Chopper, American Hot-Rod and Southern Steel all air on the Discovery Channel and were onlined at the facility. American Chopper also gave AlphaDogs the opportunity to showcase its audio bay, which the company added in late 2004. The studio mixed and sweetened the audio for the show in the new bay.

Terence Curren, president of AlphaDogs, headed the projects, which were posted using a combination of Avid Symphony and Adobe After Effects.

American Chopper is a reality show that follows the various business and social activities of a father/son custom chopper building team of Paul Teutul, Sr. and Paul Teutul, Jr. AlphaDogs posted the episodes Jr. vs. Sr. and Mikey Special. Both were finished in standard definition, though the programs were shot in both SD and HD.

American Hot Rod looks at the business of custom hot rod builder Boyd Coddington and his crew. Pilgrim Films normally edits the show in-house but turned to AlphaDogs for online edits and color correction due to a very tight deadline with the series' schedule.

Southern Steel focuses on a Virginia-based shop that creates custom motorcycles. Russell Frazier, VP of graphics technologies for AlphaDogs, created the opening titles for Southern Steel and designed graphics treatments used throughout the program. Curren led online finishing and says the biggest challenge for AlphaDogs' editing team was color-correcting the episodes.

"All of Southern Steel was shot on location in the garage or outdoors," Curren explains. "With many of the frames illuminated only by ambient lighting, we had to adjust for different outdoor/indoor environments, times of day and camera angles. Moreover, Southern Steel was shot using a combination of Mini DV and DVCAM cameras, which don't give the same range of color information to work with as higher-end cameras."

Set to premier this spring on Discovery, Dry Dock was shot in the Bahamas and documents a cruise ship makeover. Frazier created the show's opening graphics. AlphaDogs' sound editors also worked on the show.

The studio is also posting Ghost Hunters (NBC/Sci Fi Channel), The Ultimate Fighter (Spike TV), and the upcoming VH1 reality series Strip Search.
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About AlphaDogs

Founded in 2002, Burbank-based AlphaDogs, Inc. quickly established themselves as leaders and innovators in the rapidly changing digital post arena. The company maintains an early adopters edge; testing and assimilating leading technologies to keep ahead of the pack with solutions such as the RED camera and were the first post house in Los Angeles to take delivery of the Avid Symphony HD editing system. Personal attention from a seasoned award-winning team assures client satisfaction accompanies each cost-effective delivery of superior post production services—from editing and audio re-recording to broadcast design & effects.

AlphaDogs is home to the popular Editors' Lounge and headquarters of the growing media transfer specialty service Digital Service Station; now serving California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. AlphaDogs is located at 1612 West Olive, Suite 200, Burbank, CA 91506.

Visit the AlphaDogs team on the web: www.alphadogs.tv.