Lightstorm Entertainment Uses Isilon

Isilon Systems announced that James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, the production company behind such films as Abyss, Terminator and Titanic, is using Isilon IQ clustered storage to power the production of its next major motion picture Avatar. To create Avatar, Lightstorm Entertainment is employing an all-digital virtual filming environment with leading-edge, performance capture technology and Pace/Cameron’s Fusion Camera System to create a 3D movie experience unlike any yet produced. Using Isilon IQ, Lightstorm is able to unify, manage and access vast stores of unique, extremely high resolution 3D content from a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage — accelerating and simplifying its entire digital workflow from the virtual environment’s creation, to live-action motion capture and 3D convergence.

"Our unique and highly demanding workflow creates terabytes of data on a weekly and even daily basis, necessitating a storage solution with the scalability and high performance to efficiently manage our data and accelerate production," said Jon Landau, Producer, Lightstorm Entertainment. "Isilon clustered storage is so hands off, we simply turn it on and go to work."

The Avatar production generates terabytes of data in various formats, including massive digital files used in creating Avatar’s all-digital, virtual filming environment, small metadata and instructional files, still frames for review, and large media files from Avid systems. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Lightstorm’s traditional storage system lacked the concurrent performance, scalability and ease of management necessary to support Avatar’s intense production pipeline. By deploying Isilon clustered storage, Lightstorm now has the flexibility to shoot hundreds of takes of any given scene and then immediately access this content from one, highly reliable, easily scalable file system, significantly reducing workflow complexity and accelerating production. Additionally, Isilon’s unique "pay as you grow" architecture ensures Lightstorm can create massive amounts of content without storage capacity limitations, speeding time-to-results while saving valuable time and resources.

"High-definition, 3D filmmaking is the next phase in the evolution of motion pictures and represents an unprecedented opportunity for Hollywood to capture audiences like never before," said Steve Fitz, Senior Vice President, Global Field Operations, Isilon Systems. "Lightstorm’s production of Avatar is pioneering this next generation of filmmaking and its never-before-attempted production techniques are laying the groundwork for the rest of Hollywood to follow its lead."

Powered by OneFS, Isilon IQ delivers the industry’s first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon’s award-winning family of IQ clustered storage systems, including the Isilon IQ 200, 1920, 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, 9000 and 12000. Isilon also provides a robust suite of software applications including SnapshotIQ, SmartConnect, SmartQuotas, MigrationIQ, and SyncIQ that leverage OneFS and clustered storage, providing the highest levels of data protection and automated data management.