Broadcast studios and post-production based facility Sasani Studios, located in
the Sasani Studios complex in Highlands North, Johannesburg, caters for all
segments of the television broadcast and post-production market.
This multi-faceted company, with its depth of knowledge and experience dating
back to the early 1980s, has recorded some remarkable achievements. It has
perfected a reliable and proven method of recording studio productions directly
to server-based hard drives, offering complete tapeless solutions for both high
definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) productions.
Says HOD Operations at Sasani Studios Neil Van Heerden: “Our big attraction is
that we cater for a wide range of services and all types of studio productions.
We are currently providing complete solutions and services on site for M-Net’s
reality show Big Brother Africa and e.tv’s popular local soaps Scandal and
Rhythm City.
“Last year the SABC2 soap Muvhango moved to Sasani following the unfortunate
fire that damaged SABC’s studios. We also support and facilitate the 7de Laan
studios off site and cater for a variety of other studio based productions such as
Die Nataniel Tafel cookery show.’
Sasani supplied services and studios for The World Debate, which saw Tony Blair
and other high profile international and local politicians visit its premises to take
part in a live international broadcast in collaboration with other production
companies.
Van Heerden notes that Sasani provides post-production services for various
productions such as e.tv’s Ekasi: Our Stories and Mzanzi Love drama series.
“We facilitate the popular Nigerian soap, Tinsel, handling the final mix and
converting HD media creating final HD and SD broadcast masters for DStv. Sasani
has provided post services to Fox International, for National Geographic Channel
and National Geographic Wild channel promos, on a monthly basis for the past
six years,’ he comments.
All Sasani’s studios are connected to dgital controls rooms via fibre-optic and the
“Live to Drive’ tapeless offering in all studios has become very popular. Studios
can be dry hired for stand-alone shoots or be rented with full lights, cameras,
control rooms, crew and all equipment, as well as set storage, make-up rooms,
green rooms and production offices.
Additional services to complete turnkey solutions include providing multiple
format edit suites both in SD and full HD. All suites are digital, networked and
available on shared storage, allowing any suite to access the same media at the
same time, while simultaneously having the choice to access Sasani’s three top-
of-the range HD Pro-Tools audio post-production suites that include its
experienced audio engineers.
Edit suites are a mix of various HD Avid suites and HD Final Cut Pro suites and
also offer HD Adobe Premier. Sasani has a significant multi media and DVD
authoring service and has been authoring Ster-Kinekor’s masters for many
years.
Sasani’s complete offering includes the rental of fully equipped production
offices, as well as lights, cameras, edit suites and final mix all in one facility. A
wide range of cameras is available for rental for location shoots or top of the
range studio HD cameras – Grass Valley 8000 HD/SD full digital chains for studio
rental. Location camera rentals of HD P2 cameras are offered, subject to
availability.
Other facilities offered are format conversions and transfers that include creating
broadcast masters for external privately owned edit suites and from client hard
drives to convert and transfer to HD and SD broadcast tape formats such as
HDCAM, Beta SP, Digi Beta, HDDV and also onto hard drives for international
release. Sasani also offers delivery of HD media via electronic delivery to or from
international broadcasters or production houses.
