Nature of the Beast

About Doghouse Post Productions

Founded in 2004, Doghouse Post Productions provides full picture, audio post and visual effects services in the heart of Bristol’s busy creative centre.

The state-of-the-art post house offers offline and online with a choice of Avid Symphony or Adobe Premiere Pro. The facility boasts three mix, and multiple sound design studios, equipped with Genelec speaker arrays from 5.1 up to Atmos. All of Doghouse’ grading and finishing suites include 4K HDR monitoring running on DaVinci Resolve.

Doghouse’s portfolio of work encompasses film and commercials with an emphasis on television from high-end natural history through drama, factual entertainment and documentaries. Recent projects include BBC Studios’ Earth’s Tropical Islands, Primates and Chris Packham’s Animal Einstein’s, long-running favourite Antiques Roadshow, Uplands TV’s Our NHS: A Sudden History with David Olusoga for BBC One and Endemol Shine UK’s Changing Rooms for Channel 4.

What kind of work do you do at Doghouse?

Fred Tay, Creative Director.

 “We work across all genres of TV but specialise in natural history programming and work on landmark series posted in 4K HDR through to children’s formats. Much of our work is for BBC Studios but we are adding many of Bristol’s new indies to our roster of happy clients and have expanded our site and investments in HDR technology to suit.

“Doghouse is the only dedicated DaVinci Resolve facility in Bristol. Not only does Resolve have a fantastic suite of colour tools but we have also found the ongoing development of its finishing capabilities enables us to export master files efficiently, and all from within the one application.

“The BBC NHU is continually pushing the boundaries of production technology to create ever more stunning visual imagery in creative and innovative ways. The NHU was an early adopter of large-format 8K RAW filming and with high shooting ratios, we need to be able to efficiently process increasingly large amounts of data. And to do this we needed some serious horsepower.”

Why did Doghouse choose the Proline Rackmount server?

 “We were looking to streamline many of our more complex projects and to find a server system that could work across multiple departments based on demand. We run an in-house VFX facility that requires CG rendering capabilities for short bursts of time and this, coupled with high-bandwidth rushes processing and rendering UHD HDR deliverables from the Resolve, determined the high specification of the system.

 “The team at Proline by Exacta and suppliers Jigsaw24 worked hard to understand our workflows and recommended the Proline server configuration to create a balance of CPU and GPU processing. Our bespoke configuration is based around an 8-way GPU Proline rack mount server with dual Intel 4216 processors, 4x NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPU’s and 384Gb RAM. This provides us with some expansion for the future as well as a workhorse for the whole facility. It has already been nicknamed The Beast.”

Have you noticed any change in machine performance?

 “Absolutely, we are seeing an eight-fold increase in rushes processing and an increase in CG render speed. This allows us to review shots faster which in turn adds immeasurably to the creative process and refinement of our work. The range of SVoD deliverables has expanded and we would have struggled to keep up with demand without this system.”

What was the experience of working with Proline by Exacta like?

“The team at Proline by Exacta was very engaged and responsive from the outset. James Lupton and his team worked closely with us to understand our very particular and specific requirements. We felt comforted that Exacta has a legacy of building systems for FINTECH industries and we are excited to be part of the development of the Proline range. It was an added bonus that Exacta is a local supplier, also based in Bristol.”

Technical Focus by James Lupton

James Lupton, Chief Technologist, Exacta Technologies.

“Our Proline range has again received incredible feedback from yet another happy postproduction customer. Doghouse needed a scalable solution that could match the demands of multiple users simultaneously loading VFX and CG jobs into the rendering pipeline, working with popular software like DaVinci Resolve.

“With our 8-way GPU server paired with 4 powerful NVIDIA RTX A5000 GPUs, Doghouse saw stand out performance improvements with up to an eight-fold increase in rushes processing performance. Only being half populated, the GPU server still has plenty of room for additional future upgrades to scale with Doghouse’s future workloads.”

Powered by Intel, this 8-way GPU Proline rack mount server boasts incredible levels of performance and has been purpose-built for cutting-edge VFX rendering, transcoding, and virtual production. For two decades Exacta Technologies has worked closely with Intel, in 2020 we became a Titanium partner. This year we won Intel’s ‘Innovative DCG Partner of the year’ award which was a proud moment for the team at Exacta. Being an Intel partner will always be important to us as we continue to grow whilst utilising Intel’s technology.

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