Johannesburg based Sasani Studios is bridging the gap between studio camera acquisition and post-production by recording directly to hard drive using the Apple ProRes 422 Codec.
Sasani Studios is not new to the tapeless environment as it designed and has run complete tapeless turnkey solutions for various productions for the past three years. The most popular and media intensive production was Big Brother Africa, a 24 / 7 three-month reality show recording directly to shared media drive systems.
According to Sasani’s Neil van Heerden, the studio recently integrated a tapeless HD / SD solution into its flexible studio recording infrastructure.
He explains: “Our various sized film and television broadcast studios, supported by our numerous digital studio camera chains and digital control rooms, can now record directly to separate, tapeless, portable hard drives in the Apple ProRes 422 codec. This allows for a new way of connecting our clients’ production and post-production, saving time in editing and maintaining the best possible quality by recording pristine 10-bit ProRes 422 media, which is immediately available to edit within Final Cut Studio, AVID and other professional editing systems.’
Van Heerden notes that since its introduction two years ago, Apple ProRes 422 has become the codec of choice for professional editors. “Our portable hard drive recorders are the latest product to provide support for ProRes 422 natively in hardware, and for the first time deliver immediate access to the 10-bit, full raster ProRes 422 codec directly from source.
“Recording directly onto these hard drive recorders allows filmmakers, broadcasters and video professionals to skip the process of re-rendering to an editing codec by giving immediate access to full raster edit-ready ProRes 422 files. Sasani can now record hours of media to a removable storage module with built in FireWire 800 or to 34mm ExpressCard Flash. The hard drive recorder allows for real-time monitoring, providing instant playback of recorded files at the push of a button.’
The Sasani system records to single or multiple ISO feeds simultaneously with locked timecode. There is capacity to record eight channels of audio on each record device. This means that recordings on mics or instruments, or various audio feeds, can be done on individual channels, giving the audio engineer complete control over the audio in final mix.
“Clients wanting to utilise our tapeless system are required to supply their own portable hard drive. At the end of the shoot day we will copy the recorded files onto the client’s supplied portable drive and simultaneously copy the files to a Sasani network as a temporary backup (safety) until the client has confirmed that the footage is in their edit system. Sasani either offers the client the option to save the files to a proper digital archive system for long time storage or we get approval from the client to delete the files from our system,’ explains Van Heerden.
Sasani has already successfully recorded several productions on the tapeless system such as Jozi Maboneng and Comedy Sho.
