Customer Stories

posted on 13 August 2008 03:02

It's like waiting for taxis; there's a dearth of the dratted cabs and then four come along at once. Which gets us to the point that Isilon has announced four new customers at once to make an entrance with a bang at SIGGRAPH 2008 in movie city - Los Angeles.

GLOBALedit

GLOBALedit, the software and services unit of Industrial Color, has unified its multi-format image management system on Islon's IQ product. The system rovides global access to massive photo collections and a suite of workflow tools that connect creative and business communities.

Aaron Holm, Development & Integration VP at Industrial Color, said: "GLOBALedit connects creative production groups in ways previously impossible, enabling individual photographers and enterprise photo production teams alike to realize the power of a fully digital workflow. With production and distribution spread across the globe, our image management software must be able to quickly and efficiently ingest photo shoots containing 500GB to image libraries consisting of upwards of 25 Terabytes. A highly scalable, reliable and easy to use storage system is crucial to the success of our business."

Intelligent Creatures

Intelligent Creatures is a visual effects company that has worked on a number of major Hollywood films including Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Babel, The Game Plan and is currently working on The Watchmen. It is using Isilon IQ clustered storage for its entire post-production workflow, including 2D compositing and 3D animation.

Intelligent Creatures utilizes a render farm of more than 300 processors running a variety of high performance, data-intensive visual effects applications. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Intelligent Creatures traditional storage system was significantly less capable of delivering the high concurrent throughput necessary to support the around-the-clock work of its artists, hindering productivity and slowing project turnaround.

Michael Hatton, CTO for Intelligent Creatures, said: "Intelligent Creatures is focused on delivering the most progressive visual effects in the industry, enabling our Hollywood clients to tell their stories in the most compelling, visually rich manner possible. As demand grows, our work is increasingly more data-intensive and time-sensitive, requiring a storage solution with the performance and ease of management necessary to accelerate our operations without increasing costs. Isilon's clustered storage system delivered on all fronts." 

Lightstorm Entertainment

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.

Jon Landau, a producer at Lightstorm Entertainment, said: "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. Isilon clustered storage is so hands off, we simply turn it on and go to work."

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.

The Orphanage

The Orphanage, an award-winning visual effects studio that has worked on a number of major Hollywood films including Iron Man, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Sin City, and Superman Returns, has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as the primary storage platform for its latest and largest project to date. The Orphanage is using Isilon IQ to unify, manage and access the entirety of its latest major motion picture project from a single, high-performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage - streamlining the post-production process and accelerating the project's time-to-completion.

David Lloyd, Head of Systems for The Orphanage, said: "At The Orphanage, we pride ourselves on delivering leading-edge visual effects for major Hollywood films that continually advance the state of the art. With our latest project, we faced unprecedented data storage requirements for a single motion picture, requiring a unique solution with the scalability and ease of use necessary to cost-effectively power our workflow. Isilon clustered storage delivered in full, enabling us to deliver the highest quality product and meet our deadline without worrying about administrating the system or managing complex capacity additions."

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Four in one; is there any movie special effects company in Hollywood not using Isilon?

^{[Chris Mellor.]}