Preserving Hollywood treasures forever
For years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - the folks behind the Oscars - has made it its business to preserve tens of thousands of movies, and these days, it does so at the Pickford Center in Hollywood, an old TV studio.
Now, the Academy Film Archive keeps more than 76,000 titles locked away in cold storage in giant concrete vaults, safe from earthquakes and fire, all so that future generations can be sure to enjoy watching the great (and even the not-so-great) flicks this town has produced.
The Academy keeps this phalanx of tanks in the basement of the building, always at the ready to completely fill a vault with Inergen in the case of a fire. However, two different sensors in the vault must both be triggered in order to release the material, to prevent a costly false alarm.
By CNET.com's Daniel Terdiman
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