They use advanced computer systems to track deliveries and to ensure the secure delivery of prints to theatres. When a theatre receives the film, the film is removed from the small shipping reels, spliced together to form one large reel, loaded onto a platter and eventually fed through the projector where the images are projected onto the screen. The distributors and the film exchanges share responsibility for monitoring the custody of prints. At the end of the useful life of a print, the exchange collects and de-reels the film. The print is wound onto plastic cores and loaded into shipping boxes.
Care is taken to ensure that no box contains all the elements of a complete print.
The boxes are shrink-wrapped on pallets, loaded into trucks, which then have their doors sealed with numbered plastic seals, The final destination for these prints is the Film Processing Center in Mountain City, Tennessee or Milan, Italy. Last year some 18 million pounds or about 4.5 billion feet of print film were delivered to the two FPC facilities. When a truck arrives at a FPC facility, the seals on the truck doors are checked to affirm they haven't been broken. Waybills are compared to the contents of the truck, and the pallets are weighed to make certain nothing has been removed. The rolls of print film are fed into machinery that chops them into pieces or chips that are no longer than three-quarters of an inch in any direction.