On 15 January 2021, an LED volume 72 feet in diameter and 24 feet high went into operation at Pixomondo in Toronto. Crews had put it together in about two months, over the Christmas holidays, in the middle of the pandemic.

Its major productions included the fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery and the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

ROE Visual's announcement of the build counted about 2,000 Black Pearl BP2 V2 panels in the walls and 750 Carbon Series CB5 panels overhead, driven by Brompton SX40 processors. Pixomondo had billed the project, in October 2020, as the largest virtual production studio of its kind in the world.

But Pixomondo's virtual production assets now have a new owner. On 29 September 2026, Toronto studio Dark Slope announced it had bought them, plus some assets from Pixomondo's Vancouver operation. According to the release, Pixomondo had used the acquired equipment to build LED stages for Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy.

Dark Slope president Dan Fill was more specific on LinkedIn. The company, he wrote, had bought all of Pixomondo's LED assets from its stage at Pinewood Studios in Toronto, plus select assets from PXO Clara's Vancouver LED stage. Neither he nor the release itemizes the sale or says whether the Pinewood stage is the one that opened in 2021.

One sale does not make a market, but it does put a public price question in front of every studio, rental house, and lender that paid for an early LED volume. What is that equipment worth, and how easily does it move once the business that ran it closes?

Sony Pictures Entertainment bought Pixomondo in 2022. In March 2026, Sony told Pixomondo staff that its visual effects operations would close once outstanding contracts were finished, with the work going to Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Hollywood Reporter reported. PXO Clara, the LED volume division, would begin closing too. According to Pixomondo management, the move affected about 500 people.

Nathan Bazley, global director of business and operations at NantStudios, wrote in a LinkedIn post that Sony had wanted the virtual production team to spin off products for its hardware business, but that there was "not really a huge market to sell them to."

Sony had begun taking its Canadian stages apart before a buyer arrived. The Hollywood Reporter, which reported the deal as an exclusive, said that until it closed, Pixomondo's Toronto stage ranked second in size among LED stages in North America.

The wall tiles were made to move. ROE's spec sheet lists the BP2 V2 at 500 millimeters (19.7 inches) square and 9.35 kilograms (20.6 pounds), with a magnesium alloy frame and a 2.84-millimeter pixel pitch. ROE says each module stores its own calibration, and the panels use magnet-assisted assembly.

The rental house 4Wall lists the same tile and describes it as optimized for safe packing and shipping. ROE says more than 100,000 panels from the wider Black Pearl 2 series are in virtual production use, so a used BP2 V2 is a familiar product rather than a one-off.

That portability fits what Dark Slope says it wants to do next. The equipment joins its 75,000-square-foot (about 7,000-square-meter) Toronto campus, and the studio says it can now design and deploy custom volumes at its own stages or on location. 

"We can now build a custom LED volume to virtually any scale," Fill said in the announcement. On LinkedIn, he added that the inventory would let the company put up pop-up stages for studios anywhere across North America.

Tiles are only one layer. In Pixomondo's Toronto build, Unreal Engine render nodes fed the Brompton processors, which ran at 24 Hz, through passive DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters. Pixomondo's technology partners on its Toronto stages included Epic Games, ROE Visual, OptiTrack, and NVIDIA.

Any new volume built from BP2 V2 tiles has to stay inside ROE's published limits. Under the conditions ROE specifies (its own hanging bar or stacking system, indoor use, a safety factor of 5, ballast when stacking, and values given for reference), the spec sheet rates the tile to hang up to 20 panels, stack up to 12, and curve up to 10 degrees concave.

Power ratings vary by document. The spec sheet lists a maximum of 160 watts per panel, while ROE's current product page lists 190 watts. Across roughly 2,000 wall panels, that implies a theoretical maximum of 320 to 380 kilowatts, before the ceiling and supporting equipment. Neither figure is a measurement of what the original stage drew.

ROE's own published panel counts also differ. A later ROE case study on Strange New Worlds describes a 70-by-30-foot (21-by-9-meter) horseshoe of 1,800 BP2 V2 panels with 650 CB5 panels in the ceiling. Neither set of published figures can tell a buyer exactly what arrives on the truck.

Pixomondo had a partner. In June 2021, it and William F. White International announced a Canada-wide agreement to co-rent LED volume equipment, backed by a combined initial capital commitment of more than $30 million. ROE's Strange New Worlds case study describes the Toronto volume as a stage branded by both companies.

That 2021 release does not say who held title to the panels. Nor does Dark Slope's announcement say whether any jointly rented gear was part of the sale. For anyone buying a used volume, the first paperwork to ask for is proof of who owns each piece and whether a rental partner or lender has a claim on it.

Dark Slope's release, The Hollywood Reporter's story, and Animation World Network's coverage give no price. None of them lists the equipment item by item.

The Vancouver side is vaguer still. In May 2025, Pixomondo announced a stage in Langley, British Columbia, 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter and 23 feet (7 meters) tall, using Sony's Verona LED panels. In March, The Hollywood Reporter said some PXO Clara operations, potentially including a newly launching stage in suburban Vancouver, could be absorbed into the Sony Group. Fill described the Vancouver purchase as select assets from PXO Clara's LED stage there, without saying whether they include the Verona panels used at Langley.

Dark Slope's virtual production credits include Heated Rivalry, which the company says filmed extensively at its Toronto facility, as well as The Boys, its spinoff Gen V, and Ginny & Georgia. It also reports rising interest from unscripted game and competition formats, and its team will support an upcoming puppet-hybrid preschool show.

Heated Rivalry's cinematographer, Jackson Parrell, wrote in American Cinematographer that his team built the wall's environments with Dark Slope in Unreal Engine.

The volume stood in for Las Vegas, Tampa, and Sochi locations the production could not reach. With heavy page counts every day, he wrote, it let him adjust the set and lighting with fewer people.

Christopher Cox, global head of virtual production at Pixomondo and head of its PXO Clara division, said Dark Slope was "well positioned" to put the equipment to work for productions shooting in Canada.

On 29 September, Dark Slope said it planned to open a studio in Vancouver in the coming weeks. Gear that once stood behind Starfleet may next sit behind a game show or a puppet.