James Cameron's Avatar producer wows EMC World

Jon Landau, the producer of blockbuster films Titanic and Avatar, joined the keynote session on the third day of EMC World, revealing the data demands of the upcoming, CGI-intensive Avatar sequels.

Landau is chief operating officer of one of EMC's most high-profile customers, James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment production house.

He told the EMC World audience that the original Avatar – the highest-grossing film of all time – had 2 petabytes of storage. He expects this to increase to as much as 12 petabytes for the upcoming sequels. James Cameron has revealed another four films to come, likely to be set on the same fantasy world of Pandora.

Landau offered some anecdotes from his decades working with Cameron in the film business and breaking technological barriers.

Cameron's 1989 film, The Abyss, was the first to ever feature digital effects; Landau said the film's effects studio, Industrial Light & Magic, had 8 megabytes of online storage – a billion times less than on Avatar.

EMC hardware welcomes visitors to Lightstorm Entertainment's California office, Landau revealed. "When I have people come by my studio facility at Manhattan Beach, I bring them outside of the door – the door is to the machine room with EMC equipment – and I walk them in and say, 'We are not in the film business any more. It is all digital.'"

He touched on Avatar's ANZ connection: digital effects teams collaborate across Los Angeles and Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand to transport actors, including Australian actor Sam Worthington, to the Avatar world.

EMC VPLEX virtualisation architecture gives the teams simultaneous access to information within, between, and across data centres.

Landau explained how they use a "data lake" to span the divide and give the teams access to data from the first movie. Both production houses "will be working off the same databases, in sync with one another".

Lightstorm's CIO, Tim Bicio, expanded on this for an EMC video: "The concept of a data lake is really appealing to us at Lightstorm, because historically we find ourselves with little islands of data. Moving that data around becomes labor-intensive. Having a central data lake at Lightstorm we can present this data to the end user as if it is local, in-house."

The journalist travelled to EMC World as a guest of EMC.