A fresh six-screens for Parkway Workington

Darren Briggs heads north to take in the full effect at Parkway Cinema’s latest six-screen cinema revival in Workington.

PARKWAY ENTERTAINMENT, CREATED by the late Gerald Parkes, continues to thrive with his sons Richard and Gerrard now operating the chain. They have just opened their latest venue, Parkway Workington.

The latest instalment sees Parkway build its estate to four cinemas and a total of 26 screens. The cinema in Workington is a six-screen venue with projector technologies from NEC including a range of RB and modular laser, 3D screens, coupled with luxury recliner seating throughout. The site was originally slated to open in December 2022, but building cinemas is never always that straightforward — the result, however, is certainly worth the brief wait.

The technical project, led by me (Omnex’s Head of Technical services), was a project that our team has thoroughly enjoyed being a part of. We supported the complete design, specification and installation of the projection and sound equipment. Projectors are from NEC from a 4K

NC1843ML to NC120L units in the smaller screens. A 24,000 Lumen NC2403ML is used in the 3D screen.

The largest screen, at almost 15m wide, provides the customers with a seriously big screen experience in 4K resolution! Screen 2 is equipped with a Volfoni 3D system and all screens utilise Dolby’s IMS3000 servers and Dolby CP950 sound processors. QSC DCA amplifiers and speakers provide the final audio into the auditoriums. For HI and VI, a Dolby DAS system is fitted into every screen. This allows both Audio HI or VI soundtracks plus Closed Captions on the devices. The latter allows for any show to be used as a subtitled show when the DCP has compatible Closed Captions (CCAP). Films such as Avatar WOW DCPs were supplied with CCAP on all DCPs.

The cinema is driven by a new Omnex TMS, powered by Arts Alliance Media’s Screenwriter software. The big brother nine-screen Parkway site in Cleethorpes has also just upgraded to this new Omnex TMS in line with the Beverley cinema in which we installed the Screenwriter TMS in 2015.

All screens at Workington were calibrated using the CP950 via the Atmos Designer with eight microphones for the best possible quality.

The people of Workington are lucky to have such as high spec luxury cinema — and we wish the Parkway team every success from the get-go this spring.