Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 19, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
In creating the science-fiction blockbuster Avatar, honoured last night with Golden Globes in the categories “Best Film - Drama” and “Best Director”, James Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment relied on a scale-out NAS solution from Isilon Systems. Central to the success, which propelled the film to second place in the ranking of the most successful films of all time just three weeks after its cinema release, is the combination of live-action and computer-animated photorealistic sequences and 3D effects. Lightstorm used Isilon IQ systems to bring together and manage the enormous quantities of extremely high-resolution 3D content. The use of a single powerful and highly scalable storage pool that all employees could access simultaneously enabled the production company to streamline its entire workflow. From creating virtual environments to integrating live-action and 3D footage, the entire workflow could be handled more simply and quickly.
“When working on Avatar, terabytes of data were generated weekly and often even daily. Accordingly, only a powerful and highly scalable storage solution that allowed efficient management of our data and thereby accelerated the production workflow was suitable for us. Isilon’s scale-out NAS met precisely these requirements. The system is so fully automated that we simply had to switch it on and could start working immediately,” says Jon Landau, producer at Lightstorm Entertainment.
Performance, unlimited scalability and simple management
The production of Avatar generated terabytes of data in a wide variety of formats. Alongside huge files used to create the digital virtual film environment, these included smaller metadata and instruction files. In addition, still images had to be archived for review and large media files generated with the Avid systems had to be handled. The traditional storage system operated by Lightstorm before Isilon IQ was used proved inadequate for the production flow because performance and capacity could not be scaled to the required extent. Management was also complex. By switching to Isilon’s clustered-storage solution, Lightstorm gained the flexibility to shoot hundreds of takes of every scene and make the content available directly on a single, highly reliable and easily scalable file system for shared access and further processing. This simplified the workflow and accelerated the production process. Another advantage was the “Pay-as-you-Grow” architecture on which all Isilon products are based and which is distinguished above all by storage capacities that can be expanded almost without limit. This gave Lightstorm the assurance that the storage pool could be expanded easily at any time as required and that even when generating enormous quantities of data they would encounter no technical limits. Results could be realised more quickly with less expenditure of time and resources.
Perfect technology gives audiences a completely new cinema experience
Cameron broke new technical ground in realising Avatar. Among other things, he used a virtual camera specially designed for the film and a Simul-Cam, as well as the digital Fusion Camera System developed especially by him in collaboration with partner Vince Pace, which was considered the most technically advanced stereoscopic camera system in the world at the time. Another innovative tool was the facial and image-based performance-capture-stage process, with which the actors’ physical, verbal and emotional expression can be captured and processed on a computer. The 3D spectacle also set new standards in terms of data volume: New Zealand-based effects studio Weta Digital required more than one petabyte of storage capacity to process all the digital film elements, five hundred times as much as for the box-office hit Titanic, which remained in first place.
