Outdoor Partners, Camberwell, London

The Outdoor Partners Ltd. in Camberwell, South London, one of the UK's leading poster printers, has optimized its workflow with VivaPosterize and the Fuji XMF system for a full PDF workflow.

The creation and output of large format posters is very demanding and time-consuming. Outdoor Partners, whose customers include Vodafone, Intel, Continental Airlines and other blue-chip companies, had for some years been searching for a professional solution to enable them to increase their production speed while at the same time maintaining the high quality for which they are already well known.

John Chandler, the Operations Director, explains: "Outdoor needed a solution that enabled the output in sections of the UK standard large formats such as 48 sheet posters (6 x 3 metres, 12 sections) and 96 sheet (12 x 3 metres, 24 sections), that fulfilled the specific printer's requirements for colour information, and, above all, was very fast. "

In 2006, VIVA supplied Outdoor with VivaPosterize for Windows. The program was installed on a machine running Windows 2003 Server. The program was used primarily to transfer the colour information to the press while the plates were being imaged from film in the traditional way.

"The VivaPosterize workflow solved the colour information problem for us", said Nick Sheehan, in charge of Outdoor's pre-press department. "From importing the job into VIVA to the output of the press sheets as PDFs takes just a few seconds," said Rob Smith, one of the software's main users who had had previous experience of using it with another workflow.

In 2008, Outdoor Partners installed the Fuji XMF Workflow, which due to the fact that there is no conversion to PostScript from the PDF files is considerably faster than previous systems.

In July 2009 an Agfa Xcalibur platesetter was installed, allowing Outdoor to optimize their workflow still further by implementing a full CTP system.

"It was the speed and the simplicity of the whole process which impressed us," said Mr. Chandler. " This new system has improved our production enormously. Now we have the situation that XMF generates a workable PDF which is processed by VivaPosterize in seconds, and the RIP time has been reduced drastically."