Case Study: Lightstorm Entertainment halves turnaround time and accelerates global VFX delivery with Aspera

Aspera Software Maximizes Data Transfer Efficiency For The Production Of James Cameron's Record-Breaking Epic

Lightstorm Entertainment — James Cameron’s production company on Avatar — faced the challenge of moving massive visual‑effects data sets (tens of GB daily and many 100+GB files bi‑monthly) between Los Angeles and a partner studio in New Zealand. Conventional FTP and physical shipping were impractically slow, insecure and error prone, causing delays, damaged drives and repeated re‑ingestion of content.

Lightstorm deployed Aspera Enterprise Server built on fasp™ transport to send data electronically and securely. The result: consistent transfer speeds over 45 Mbps (15–30× faster than FTP), roughly halving turnaround time, full transfer tracking and bandwidth control, simplified setup and support, a file‑streamlining feature for many small files, and lower operational costs with no per‑transfer fees.

Lightstorm Entertainment

Steve Madonna

System Engineer, Lightstorm Entertainment