Technicolor scientists find new way to archive films - by encoding them in DNA
A vial barely bigger than a bullet holds 1 million copies of a movie, meaning the film libraries of every Hollywood studio could fit into a Lego brick if the coding process can be made commercially viable
A Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water – and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.
The company has come a long way since the Hollywood golden age, when the world gazed in awe at the lush palette of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind provided by its three-strip cameras.
Now celebrating its centenary year, Technicolor’s laboratories are at the cutting edge of the science of filmmaking, leading a worldwide revolution in immersive entertainment.
“We are bigger today in [Los Angeles] than we were 70 years ago or 50 years ago,” Technicolor chief Frederic Rose said at a recent ceremony where he accepted a “star of recognition” from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
Rose used the occasion at Technicolor’s Sunset Boulevard studios to showcase the company’s latest jaw-dropping innovation – the encoding of movies into artificial, “non-biological” DNA.
