AlphaDogs Digital Service Station Ingests with Bluefish444
By Jim Bask
(Burbank, California–June 7, 2016) AlphaDogs is a Burbank-based post production facility and design studio offering a full suite of creative services for television, cinema and new media. Although it works in a variety of areas, the bulk of Alpha Dogs projects are in Reality TV and Independent Features, offering such services as post production consultation, video finishing, color correction, motion graphics, visual effects, audio post, media services, and rental suites.
Terence Curren, Founder of AlphaDogs, saw the technological trends in post-production and their effects on the traditional business model, that with the falling costs of equipment and opportunity for producers to invest in their own post production systems, talent would be the deciding factor in the longevity of post-production service in the years to come. Hence, he and a team of like-minded individuals founded the company almost 15 years ago.
Since its founding, AlphaDogs has investigated & implemented new editing methods that give clients a quality finished product quickly and inexpensively. In 2003 the company introduced its Editors’ Lounge series, a hands-on seminar for industry professionals. Each month, professionals in the production and post-production industries come together and exchange ideas, discuss trends and learn about new technologies.
In 2004, AlphaDogs introduced a Digital Service Station(tm) division. Digital Service Station (DSS) gives independent producers a one-stop solution to importing and exporting material from tape to hard drive and back to tape – a competitive alternative to renting expensive decks or hiring assistants, and which has expanded to different cities since its introduction.
Terence states, “The Digital Service Station acts as a self-serve ingest and output opportunity for editors with NLEs and no access to videotape machines. As a consequence, they can do a lot of capturing from videotape. The Bluefish444 IngeSTore software and Epoch | 4K Supernova S+ card utilized in the system allows us to capture multiple streams of video at the same time, which reduces the ingest time on large multi-tape jobs. We use the card for mass tape capture jobs. One recently involved capturing hundreds of hours of Gulf War footage from HDCam tapes.”
IngeSTore is Bluefish444’s free multi channel ingest software compatible with all Bluefish444 video cards. It captures multiple simultaneous channels of uncompressed SD/HD SDI to uncompressed or OP-ATOM compliant DNxHD media for archive, edit, encoding or analysis. IngeSTore drives efficiency in the digitization workflow by enabling multiple simultaneous recordings from VTR’s, camera’s and other SDI sources.
Terence continues, “We looked at a variety of products, but the bundled Bluefish444 IngeSTore software and hardware combination was the only reasonably priced solution for multiple streams of capture that fit our needs. It can record simultaneously whilst editing in Adobe and Avid NLEs, which is very useful for multi tasking. And the company has been responsive to any communications we had and were extremely helpful in setting up the product initially.”
Having successfully conquered the transition to HD, the AlphaDogs team continues to research the latest innovations and develop practical workflows, including the emerging tapeless and 4K workflows.