LOUISVILLE, CO -- Weta Digital Limited, the digital effects company behind the film production of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic, "The Lord of the Rings," is one of the first in its industry to automate the handling of digital data storage tapes, improving efficiency, saving money and protecting its precious digital assets. StorageTek(R) (Storage Technology Corp., (NYSE: STK)), an expert in high-performance, efficient digitized data storage, supplied a TimberWolf(R) 9710 tape library and six DLT 7000 tape drives, which take the place of four full-time tape operators who would otherwise have been required to handle more than 2,500 tapes in circulation. Weta Digital's chief technical officer, Jon Labrie has overseen the spending of around $8.3 million to build an information technology (IT) infrastructure to support the creation of next generation digital effects for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The total cost of digital effects makes up a substantial portion of the films' total production costs, he said. The first film, "The Fellowship of the Ring," was delivered to New Line Cinema by Oct. 1 for a Dec. 19 release date. The technical officer says automation is great. "It has made what was a difficult, at times maddening, part of creating digital effects easy," he said. "It's an automated process -- we put up a window and click on a file and they are there. That's a tremendous luxury for us because we have lots of other problems to worry about." This entirely point and click process differentiates Weta Digital from every other digital effects company that Labrie is aware of, where manual tape handling is still the norm. This means that Weta Digital can retrieve information more quickly, more accurately and at a lower cost than most other digital effects companies. Labrie faces "specific challenges involving the creation and management of large amounts of data." Every day, a team of 160 digital effects artists creates around one terabyte of new data. "The problem is, because of the nature of the work, every person in this building is a power user," he said. Each frame of film takes up 12 megabytes, and there are multiple frames in every "shot," with 300 to 500 gigabytes having to be backed up onto digital tape every day. These "off-line" backup tapes are taken offsite and stored in an earthquake proof building once every week. The key to Weta Digital's success in managing more than 45 terabytes of information has been the creation of a hierarchical storage management system. The StorageTek robotic tape library's 588 tape slots keep more than 10 terabytes of Nearline(R) information available to be called up onto disk within two to five minutes. Between 200 and 400 gigabytes per day are moved between "online" disk systems on which film scanners and digital effects artists work and the near-line storage available on the StorageTek TimberWolf 9710. Material kept on Nearline includes original film scans and shots completed by digital effects artists. "That's in case someone says, 'Hey, I want to have a final go at that shot,'" said Labrie. For further information visit www.storagetek.com