HOT HOUSE: AlphaDogs Brings Post Power to the People

A Kinko’s for the post world? That’s the idea behind the new Digital Service Station media transfer division of AlphaDogs, a post-production facility in Burbank, CA. “It saves time and money for someone who needs something they don’t normally have,” explains AlphaDogs founder and president Terence Curren. “Rather than having to rent a deck for a day, install and configure it, use it, and then have to dismantle it and return it, a client can send tapes and drives to the DSS, pay a smaller hourly charge and have the digitizing work done by DSS with the assurance that it was done quickly, correctly and within all the right technical specs.” If they are hands-on folks, he adds, clients can rent a station and do the work themselves. “I haven’t seen anyone else offering this kind of one-stop-shop media transfer service, and I know there’s a huge potential market for anything that makes life easier for editors.”

AlphaDogs itself offers a full spectrum of online and offline editing services, graphic design, DVD menu creation and audio sweetening. Eight full-time staff (including editors, assistant editors, graphic designers, audio mixers and general office personnel) occupy the company’s 5,000-square-foot facility. The new DSS division simply makes the hardware and software in AlphaDogs’ edit bays, as well as its creative talent, available to clients on a flexible basis. The division opened for business last year and immediately began to take off.

It’s a community thing: Curren says he came up with the idea for DSS because he wanted to offer other editors an alternative to acquiring expensive equipment or hiring extra staff to digitize when time and money ran short. By providing his company’s equipment and experienced staff to clients at several price levels-including hourly and daily workstation rentals and self- or full-service options (and almost anything in between) – Curren puts some of the industry’s most powerful technology and know-how within the reach of, well, just about everybody. "It’s taken on a life of its own without us really pushing it," he says.

Projects that have passed through DSS’s edit bays run the gamut from first-effort tape captures for the occasional walk-in to post-production work for Steven Spielberg’s ongoing documentary archive for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

Curren, who says his company’s primary focus is on talent, not equipment, has managed to outfit AlphaDogs and by extension, DSS, with some pretty impressive tools, including Avid Xpress Pro on up to Media Composer Adrenaline, Symphony and DS Nitris; Apple Final Cut Pro HD decked out with both AJA and Blackmagic hardware; and a Pro Tools audio bay. DSS can also handle most formats clients throw at them, including HD, HDV, DigiBeta, BetaSP and DVCAM. And where files are coming from – and where they need to go – doesn’t matter: Clients can read from or write to FireWire drives, DVDs, CDs, do FTP transfers over the Internet, and encode streaming media files.

DSS, a division of AlphaDogs, offers media transfer services to pros, providing an alternative to renting equipment or hiring freelance when you need to digitize fast. Clients can do either do their own work on site or, better yet, use AlphaDogs/DSS staff.

Terence Curren, president; Russell Frazier, senior designer/animator; John Moore, VP video editing; Marcus Pardo, VP audio mixing; Sean Williams, VP visual design.

Avid Symphony
Avid Media Composer Adrenaline
Avid Xpress Pro
Apple Final Cut Pro HD
AJA and Blackmagic hardware

AlphaDogs
www.4alphadogs.com
1612 West Olive Ave., Suite 200
Burbank, CA 91506
ph. 818.729.9262