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Reality TV THE BATTLE AlphaDogs (www. alphadogs.tv) in Bur- bank will handle the occasional feature, but the bulk of its work comes from re- ality TV clients. The studio has a long his- tory in editing and finishing reality series, and in recent weeks has been working on a number of shows, including Stuck With Hack- ett, Enough Already, Pregnant in Heels and Desert Car Kings. AlphaDog’s Sean Stack in the studio’s Apple Color suite. Most of The Battle was shot on Red, making fast turnaround a challenge. cuses on a husband and his four wives in Utah. It’s shot on XDCAM EX, and like the other shows posted at Serious Robots, is loaded onto the TerraBlock at full resolution. Editors cut in DNx220. Audio is posted at sister facility Blazing Music + Sound using Avid Pro Tools.The stu- dio recently upgraded to Version 9. Krabacher says that while the shows are broadcast in stereo, the studio is still re- quired to provide splits to the network.They deliver on the HDCAM SR format, which al- lows for all of those deliverables. One of the more challenging series Al- phaDogs has posted is The Battle, which airs on ESPNU.The series focuses on the march- ing bands of several southern US schools and the rigorous preparations they go through to get ready for a final multi-school competition. Terry Curren is the founder of Al- phaDogs and handles finishing on shows that employ an Avid workflow. They also post some shows using Final Cut Pro. “The Battle was [hard],” he explains.“They came to us and already shot the majority of the show.The director thought it would be great to shoot it with a Red camera, but that’s not really the best way to shoot a real- ity show, especially one where they have a short turnaround.” Reality TV, by nature, involves shooting a lot of footage, something that’s not entirely practical when capturing to disk. Getting all of that material into a central storage sys- tem that allows multiple editors access si- multaneously also presents challenges. And let’s not forget short turnaround times. The Battle involved a half-dozen or so episodes covering multiple schools, with the final episode featuring the competition. “It actually aired about six days after the competition,” Curren recalls of the finale. “They shot all of the other episodes with the Red camera and talked about doing the final one that way.With all of the problems that we had getting it all crunched through, I went to the producer and said, ‘If you want to shoot with the Red camera, you can’t have this kind of turnaround.’ Fortunately, they listened.” The final episode was shot using Sony EX3s. In total, The Battle called on five editing bays, up from the initial two, and 6TBs of shared storage, which was provided via a TerraBlock.This show employed a Final Cut workflow, so the Red files were converted to ProRes HQ for editing and finishing.