London-based Cinesite is going stereoscopic 3-D with the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film, On Stranger Tides, coming from Disney May 20, 2011. Cinesite, which is currently working on John Carter of Mars, will create 860 vfx shots for On Stranger Tides.

Cinesite will launch vfx services for both films shot in 3-D (like On Stranger Tides) and conversion of 2-D to 3-D. To accommodate its new 3-D services, Cinesite is growing its staff by 40% and taking on a new floor in its building to accommodate 85-100 vfx artists, adding another 7,000 square feet to its 30,000 square feet of post facilities. Having already added 250 terabytes of storage from BlueArc, Cinesite anticipates approaching half a petabyte of disc space and about 1,000 cores by the end of the year, with an additional 1,000 cores in 2011.

The Kodak-owned facility is also transitioning to Nuke for compositing, providing an additional 500 vfx seats, and has purchased a Dolby stereoscopic projection system for its 36-seat screening room, a stereo 3-D-capable Scratch viewing system and stereo 3-D editing suites.

"If there is a need for stereoscopic conversion, we think it should be done as part of vfx to get premium results," explained Michele Sciolette, head of VFX Technology at Cinesite. "We are looking at tools for such issues as camera line up and color differences between the two cameras."

For recruiting details, visit www.cinesite.com/jobs/.