Dresden Royal Palace Upgrades Video Wall with Christie Apex Series and Pandoras Box

The Royal Palace in Dresden, Germany recently retrofitted its video wall, replacing it with Christie Apex Series LED and Christie Pandoras Box for the image processing. Located in the State Art Courtyard entrance, the 8.25m x 1.16m LED wall welcomes visitors with information and images of the Palace and city's history. Dresden Royal Palace is one of many expressions of the cultural diversity found in Saxony's capital and both the origin and center of the State Art Collections.

The engineering firm Steffen Dreßler in Dresden were tasked with planning and monitoring construction work and installation of the media equipment. For the video wall, the choice was Christie Velvet Apex Series 1.9mm LED, a Christie E600 Controller for controlling the modules, and Pandoras Box. The equipment was supplied and installed by Christie partner Matec Handelsgesellschaft für Meß- und Audiovisionstechnik mbH Dresden.

Installed in the courtyard featuring a glazed roof, the 540 x 4160 pixels resolution LED video wall comprises 39 tiles each of which is front serviceable.

"We used to use LCD displays, but found it difficult to produce homogeneous images across all the displays - primarily because individual displays repeatedly encountered errors. We were very keen to avoid this, while also keeping our future options open in terms of uploading more video content or animations," says Michael John, head of construction, technology, and safety at the Dresden State Art Collections.

The installation team and the Dresden Art Collection administrators immediately noticed the Christie Apex Series difference even with the ambient light shining through, and the heat.

"Due to the strong sun exposure and the installation on the façade of the historic courtyard, it was necessary to select a system capable of housing power supplies and controller technology away from the actual LED tiles, which is the case with the Christie Apex Series," says Steffen Dreßler from the engineering firm commissioned.

Klaus Finken, CEO at Matec GmbH Dresden, adds, "In the context of the special construction requirements on site, the front installation and maintenance options were the key factors that spoke in favor of the new system."

The Pandoras Box media player is located in the server room, connected to the Dresden State Art Collections network. This network then feeds the controllers of the LED video wall via fiber optic connections. Not only can the Pandoras Box solution be used for playback of 4K content and various image formats, the entire image area can also be broken down into three sequences when necessary. Dresden Royal Palace welcomes 5,000 visitors daily and 1.5 million visitors per year, all of whom see the LED display in the entrance area. Since it was commissioned, the wall operates approximately 12 hours a day, 350 days a year.

"We close for one week every year and shut down all of the systems to perform maintenance. However, the systems run continuously on all other days of the year," says John. "To date, our experience of using the technology has been excellent."