Crush Reborn As Blink Digital Dvd Authoring House

Whether the traditional recording studio can survive these days is debatable, but facilities that provide integrated video services along with audio production are most likely to stay in business. Judging by its popularity, the convergence of media offered on DVD is here to stay, regardless of the lifespan of the format itself.

DVD authoring facility Blink Digital provides an example of the contemporary production and post-production environment, applying elements of traditional and new-media production in an entity that has authored more than 1,000 DVDs—including DVD-Audios (DVD-A)—in the music, TV, and film genres.

Managing director Jeff Stabenau has forged a thriving new-media facility despite the demise of its original parent company, Crush Digital.

That company, a pioneering independent DVD authoring facility he founded in 1996, was reborn as Blink, now a subsidiary of the Ascent Media Group.

The unprecedented consumer acceptance of DVD "seemed stunningly obvious," recalls Stabenau, a video editor prior to founding Crush.

"I don't feel smart about it, I just read the news like everybody else. It just seemed obvious.

"I was always interested in the computer-based applications of video and audio," Stabenau adds, "so it was a natural area of my interest, if not expertise.

"I set out to create a company that split the difference between a post-production company and what I was calling a multimedia company, or a new-media company.

"I wanted to combine the production values that you get at a real audio or video studio with the attitude and working style of a multimedia company, which is project-based.

"I saw that multimedia companies didn't pay enough attention to quality and production value, and that high-end production companies weren't good enough at customer service and left too much up to the client. Instead, we formed a company around project managers who become extensions of the client."

With high-resolution audio and video, surround sound, and Dolby Digital, DTS, and MLP encoding, DVD can carry plenty of information.

Presenting this high-density product in a compelling manner and with an easy-to-navigate menu is a skill for which demand continues to grow. "It's too complicated a format to leave it up to everybody individually," Stabenau says.

In addition to such recent projects as the Homicide TV series, a Capitol Records sampler, and the DVD-A of Staind's 14 Shades of Grey, Blink is providing DVDs that are bundled with CDs, a tactic labels are increasingly employing to add value to the latter format.

Stabenau says, "We're doing 40, 50 DVDs a month. A lot of companies just give us their work: They'll say, 'We've got six per month, just do them.' "