During the making of the "Rings" trilogy, Jackson and his Wellington, New Zealand-based Weta Digital crew upped the ante on Apple's innovative iPod storage technology, using it for a few rigorous filmmaking sessions during production on "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King," the latter of which collected 11 Oscar noms Tuesday.

The Weta wizards set up a review and approval system for remote digital dailies centered around iPods that spanned the globe from New Zealand to London.

For two months on each of the films, Jackson was stationed in the United Kingdom overseeing composer Howard Shore's scoring sessions. And during "Towers" and "King," Jackson also maintained a videoconferencing line to Weta so that he could spend about two hours a day reviewing the movie's progress in absentia.

Jim Rygiel, a two-time Oscar winner and visual effects supervisor who picked up his third Oscar nom Tuesday, says Weta's cyber Tolkien Trail was seeded by a dedicated server, safely isolated from Weta's intranet and connected to a secure outside line.

Media was transferred from Weta to Pinewood Studios in London. There, Jackson's 30-gig iPod was ready and waiting to upload Weta's daily fresh-baked shots and sequences. His iPod was then delivered via sneaker net to his home a few minutes away from Pinewood.

Jackson then viewed those 1K-resolution QuickTime files on an Apple Cinema Display, tied to his G4 laptop, which drew directly from his iPod. The director's setup was mirrored in New Zealand, so Rygiel and crew could step through shots with the help of their iPods, with Jackson's guidance piped in over a videoconferencing system. During the course of two movies and four months, "Rings" iPods stored and served up nearly one-half terabyte of digitized footage from "Towers" and "King."