WWE Hall of Famer Howard Finkel spots some tapes in a side hallway while being led through WWE's state of the art facility.
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Director of Media Technology Bryan Staffaroni and Director of Asset Management George Germanakos lead a WWEClassics.com producer through the tape library.
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The digital archive robot is a large complex machine in a climate-controlled room with 4,000 data tape slots used to store material.
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Each data tape can hold approximately 24 hours of footage.We did get the opportunity to see the robot in action.
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Arms slide back and forth, grabbing tapes and moving them backwards into drives that read the tapes.
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Germanakos hard at work in WWE's digital server center.
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The room includes storage silos and servers for both high and low resolution that are used in two editing environments: Grass Valley and Avid.
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The room was referred to us as "the nervous system of our entire post-production team."
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Finkel is led into the motherload of our visit.
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Floor-to-ceiling shelves move along a mechanical track, allowing WWE to pack more than 40,000 tapes into a tiny room for easy organization and access.
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Germanakos and Staffaroni inspect the goods.
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The room is full of nearly every wrestling broadcast a fan could ever imagine.
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WWEClassics.com producers were in awe at the sheer volume of relics housed along the shelves.
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George Germanakos and Bryan Staffaroni: Two of the most important men in the wrestling business that nobody knows.
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The Fink shows off some of his favorites in the AWA collection.
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Some footage is so old, an entire reel will be digitized if a specific match is needed from it. The tape might be destroyed after one more use.
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In addition to WWE’s main facility in Stamford, Conn., a large portion of the company’s tape library is kept at Iron Mountain, a nuclear bomb-proof cave in New York State’s Catskill Mountains.