Opera on Big Screen with BARCO

“Die Zauberflöte” is a musical fairy tale, telling how people grow to become mature, showing the confrontation between the intellectual world and the dreams of the nature-lover. On Sunday 21 January, the staging of this new production by the Flemish Opera was displayed simultaneously on large screens over 100 m² in 13 cinemas of the Kinepolis Group in 6 Flemish cities: Antwerp (Metropolis), Ghent (Decascoop), Brussels, Hasselt, Kortijk and Louvain (all of them Kinepolis).

With the “open air” staging of opera productions such as La Bohème (1997) and Il Trovatore (1998), the Flemish Opera and BARCO had already shown that culture and highly advanced technology could be combined. In 1998 they cooperated with the Kinepolis Group on another event to bring culture to a large audience – the live staging of Rigoletto.

The Kinepolis Group is one of the major cinema groups in the world. Infrastructure, comfort and the wide variety of capabilities make the difference with Kinepolis. Film again becomes a "big screen" spectacle, a world of dreams and magic, supported by the best possible sound reproduction. Today, the Group is again assuming the leadership with the introduction of the state-of-the-art Digital Cinema and use of the cinemas as multifunctional rooms for business-to-business applications. International meetings, roadshows, product launches and cultural events are being supported with the latest technology, from conventional video projection to image transmission via satellite and Digital Cinema.

For the projection of the digital images the Flemish Opera again selected the BARCO-technology. As a 20-year market leader in large screen projection, BARCO has been designing state-of-the-art visualization systems for a broad range of applications: from the home cinema, the meeting room, the simulator or the control room to the auditorium, the event hall, the concert field, the sports arena, and even the market of digital billboarding.

Every year, BARCO invests more than 10 % of its turnover in research and development. The company has recently found a new challenge in developing a Digital Cinema concept. Last year, BARCO signed a co-operative development agreement with Texas Instruments, giving BARCO as one of only three projector-manufacturers access to TI´s new DLP Cinema™ technology. At the end of last year, BARCO introduced a first result of this agreement: the “D-CineStar” digital cinema projector. This new reference solution for cinema with an extremely high contrast (1000:1) and a light output of 12 ft. Lambert, has already been used for Digital Cinema trials all over the world.

For the staging of “Die Zauberflöte”, BARCO, in collaboration with specialized technicians, equipped the 13 cinemas with high brightness projection systems. In 2 large cinemas in Antwerp and Brussels BARCO ELM R12 DLP™-projectors were used to display the digital images. This predecessor of the “D-CineStar” delivers images with an impressive 12,000 ANSI lumens and an extreme color and video quality. All other cinemas were equipped with Barco 6400 LCD-projectors. These compact projection systems display all video and computer sources with a light output up to 3,400 ANSI lumens.

This BARCO-technology has recently been used for many other events: the celebration of 850 years Moskou, a large number of productions during the Salzburg Festival, the various presentations during the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, the Oscar en Emmy Awards Celebrations in Hollywood, the Millennium speech of the former US President Bill Clinton and the inauguration of the new President Georges W. Bush, …, to name only a few.

For more information, please contact

Els Van Loocke
Marketing Communications Manager
Barco Presentation&Simulation

Telephone +32 56 368667
contact.bps@barco.com