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Based in the heart of Soho, The Sanctuary is a busy facilities house with an undeniably well-deserved reputation for being one of the UK’s premier post-production facilities.

The Sanctuary is a ‘one-stop’ solution, offering services including, Editing, Finishing, Motion Graphics, Digital Media Management & Delivery, Audio Post Production & V/O Facilities, Duplication and DVD Authoring for the creation of high quality TV Programmes, Commercials, DVDs, Promos, Concerts, Corporate Videos and Web solutions.

We spoke to Maryan Kennedy, the facility's managing director, to ask her what she feels has made The Sanctuary a creative haven.

Her first response was simply ‘the team’! - The Sanctuary has been operational since April 2002, just as high-definition production was starting to become a standard – Tony Waters, our Head of Technical Operations, designed the facility to be HD ready from day one. We have grown rapidly, and now have 20 rooms based in a 5,000-foot square premises, with 25 full-time staff.

An amount of the work we handle is brought to us from within the Sanctuary Group, which we are a part of, but over 90% of our work is sourced from external clients, with a great spread of all types of post-production work.

One of the main benefits we feel we offer clients is an end-to-end service, with the majority of our clients getting us involved at the pre-production stage, especially when it comes to HD, which has become our specialist area. We are a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week facility, our main objective is to service our clients in a relaxed but highly creative and productive environment.

Equipment-wise The Sanctuary has a reputation for being ‘state of the art’, particularly in the Avid non-linear editing & finishing suites and digital content management the facility offers, how important do you feel it is to be ahead of the pack?

These are the two main areas that we feel really sets us apart from our competition, we pride ourselves in the fact that we are ‘state of the art’ equipment wise, and even provide bespoke solutions for specific client needs. The Sanctuary’s Avid DS Nitris suites allow our clients the flexibility that they need, we really can offer everything in one room.

We are also running several software packages along side our Avid DS Nitris systems, such as Digital Fusion, which compliments the DS but also offers a 3d environment, this allows us to deliver our clients a more creative solution.

We made support of our Avid suites a priority from day one, we have a technical staff which we believe is second to none, in our view our suites are only functional if they are fully operational 100% of the time – we operate a zero downtime policy at The Sanctuary.

We’ve also gone to great lengths to ensure our tech staff are Avid and I.T. qualified to the very highest level – with Avid certified qualifications in DS, Unity and Media Composer at both ACSR (Avid Certified Support Representative) and ACI (Avid Certified Instructor) status - In our opinion, in this area we definitely have the best team in town.

In a very competitive market, The Sanctuary is undoubtably a great success, what combination of services do you feel makes The Sanctuary a great post-production facility?

We have a great team that we are very proud of and a great mix of creative talent, technical knowledge and customer service, this allows us to create a relaxed, stress free, productive working environment for our clients, they know that they can depend on us to manage their projects all the way through to final delivery.

We have always endeavoured to run the facility like a family; everyone pulls together to do whatever it takes to deliver what the client needs. This is what we believe has given us the success we have achieved.

What projects have you been working on recently?

We’ve been completely flat out recently with The Album Chart Show, a new twenty week series being produced by 3DD for Channel 4 which is now being aired three times a week across C4 and E4 – It’s a full HD production – we are responsible for show direction and technical management as well as graphic design, full post & finishing, web design and management with the added pressure of being a very fast turnaround, which we feel must be pretty unique for a post house.

You’ve been doing business with GearBox for a while now – why?

We started using GearBox due to one particular experience. We were working on a very large HD project, which had a very tight deadline, all was going fine until we went to play out and the HD deck that we had hired from another rental house was faulty, this was midnight on a Friday night, but shouldn’t have been a problem as the company we were using had a “24 hour support service”. After several conversations with the company and them agreeing that there clearly was a problem with the deck they had supplied, they said there was nothing they could do as it was out of their office hours.

We had to deliver the masters by 8am Saturday morning and had to find a solution quickly, we phoned every hire company we could find, not one could help us - just when we thought we were going to have to tell the client that we could not deliver, we got hold of Michael Pearce at GearBox, it was now getting on for 1am in the morning, he was with us within an hour and absolutely saved the day - which is exactly why we use Gearbox for all of our HD rental kit now, we could not ask for more from a supplier, their service and support is truly second to none!

The Sanctuary
Tel: 020 7734 4480
Contact: Daniel, Anthony or Maryan
Web: www.thesanctuary.tv