Vancouver’s recent production rebound has led to the arrival of at least one new post house and another one expanding.

Santa Monica, CA-based Entity FX recently launched a visual effects studio in the city’s Yaletown district to meet a growing need for coordinated FX work between Los Angeles and Vancouver.

After long retaining a full-time FX supervisor in Vancouver, Entity president Mat Beck figured it was time to open a full-service Canadian facility wired for seamless collaboration and file-sharing with the 75-or-so employees back at the Santa Monica flagship.

‘We already have some talent in place. The logical next step is to go into a full-blown subsidiary,’ he says on the phone from the U.S. facility.

Beck says that Entity aims to service both L.A. producers shooting in Vancouver as well as Canadian projects.

‘If we have a facility up there and down here, we can serve everyone better,’ he adds.

The Entity FX North operation will initially accommodate 20 to 30 employees, with room for more. Best known for its work on The CW’s locally shooting Smallville, and features including The Aviator and Miami Vice, Entity offers on-set FX supervision and production, CGI, matte painting, live-action photography, miniatures and second unit direction.

‘One of the things we take pride in is that we [act as] creative collaborators. Our emphasis is on having good effects and helping in the storytelling process,’ Beck says.

Entity’s post slate is primarily movie and TV work, but commercial work is also on tap.

Beck acknowledges that opening a Vancouver studio underlines his belief in the future of the city’s production sector. Renewed tax credits have led to a resurgence in guest production, and the post sector is further benefiting from the Digital Animation or Visual Effects (DAVE) tax credit. At the same time, Beck admits that he and other Entity staffers are avid skiers, and Whistler’s nearby snowy peaks beckon.

Meanwhile, Vancouver post shop Digital Film Group is expanding, banking in part on the notion that more post work on U.S. film and TV guest production will stay in B.C., instead of going back to L.A. after shooting. DFG recently opened Digital Film Central to offer Vancouver’s first top-flight digital intermediate and film-out facility.

‘It’s a new company in many respects, doing a lot more services than we had before,’ says James Tocher, owner of DFG, which specializes in video-to-film transfer, with credits including The Corporation and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Tocher’s partner in Central is shop president and GM Curtis Staples, a veteran of Rainmaker and Sonic Foundry.

In the DI process, captured film footage is scanned at high resolution before being conformed, edited and graded in the digital domain. FX can also be integrated, and the resulting digital master is then recorded back onto film for digital or film projection. It is a service B.C. has sorely needed, and among Central’s local competitors, Rainmaker reports that it intends to roll out its own DI setup in the coming months.

‘The [Vancouver] market has reached a threshold of demand for digital intermediate services,’ Tocher says. ‘The feedback from producers is that their biggest frustration is the lack of a DI house.’

Besides film, Central can also conform and grade digital content from new HD cameras such as the Arriflex D-20 or the Panavision Genesis, capable of capturing 2K and 3K digital file formats.

Tocher says that much of Central’s DI work – using Arri scanning and recording technology – is carried out at 2K (roughly 2,000 lines of pixel resolution), but that 4K (a 4096 x 3112 image size) is increasingly utilized by producers who can afford to spend more for the added clarity.

DI requires large amounts of digital data to be stored and manipulated in realtime, so most movies are scanned, processed and recorded back to film at 2K, with only the rare Hollywood movie being entirely treated at 4K.

Central says it is the only 6K-capable, pin-registered DI house in town. But while it scans at 6K, the digital content is usually down-sampled to a more manageable 2K, or HD-quality.

HD scanning has become a viable resolution for those on a budget. Tocher points out that HD is much higher quality than it used to be, and that the tape-based HDSR format offers better sampling and less compression. HDSR is more cost-effective by eliminating expensive 2K file storage and realtime manipulation, while still yielding high-quality results.

Tocher says Central is targeting big-budget studio shoots as well as mid- and low-budget producers, and aims at handling between 30 and 40 features annually.

www.entityfx.com

www.digitalfilmgroup.com