Post-production company Pictorion Das Werk has opened a location in Vancouver, its first outside of Germany, offering a digital intermediate facility that can handle images in film resolution of up to 6K - far above the usual 2K, or 2,000 pixels, used for most DI scans.

According to Jan Kruse, a digital artist who heads the three-person shop, working at 6K on PDW's $500,000 Imagica Imager XE Advanced digital scanner provides a clearer picture for more controlled digital color grading. Scanners operating at this level are available at Deluxe and Cine-Byte in Toronto, but not in Vancouver.

"The images are very stable. In many cases you would go for 2K and in some others 4K, because the quality and efficiency is considered more than enough," says Kruse (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers).

PDW has six locations in Germany, and has worked on features The Scorpion King and The Pianist and dozens of German productions. Founder and president Michael Endres says he saw the need for PDW in Vancouver when his team arrived to work on the feature video game adaptation In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (formerly Dungeon Siege), a German production being serviced by Vancouver's Brightlight Pictures.

"The producers asked us to bring our equipment over to do the scanning and color grading," says Endres, on the phone from Germany. "We realized the closest place producers could get [the 6K DI] done was either Toronto or Los Angeles... and figured it would be a good idea to build this little shop."

Doug Oddy, visual effects supervisor on the Dungeon Siege film, which involves more than 900 FX shots, is pleased not to have to go out-of-province for the film's DIs.

"[PDW has] a facility where we can do 2K scanning and have those scans projected digitally [in HD] to do review work prior to going to film," says Oddy. "It is speeding up our process. Traditionally we've had to wait for prints and projections."

With an investment of about $1 million, PDW launched on March 8. It uses industry standard FilmLight Baselight v3 for color grading.

www.das-werk.de