Odessa's offices in South London

After more than five years of successful application of VivaPosterize with the Brisque workflow system, Odessa Offset in South London, one of the UK's leading poster printers and Printweek's Poster Printer of the Year 2004-2005, has optimized its workflow with VivaPosterize and Kodak's Prinergy Evo system for a full PDF workflow.

The creation and output of large format posters is very demanding and time-consuming. Odessa Offset, whose customers include Anheuser Busch, Procter & Gamble, Saatch & Saatchi, Panasonic, BMW, Air France, British Airways and Coca-Cola, 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.

Dean Orchin, the Production Director, said: "Odessa needed a solution that enabled the output 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 the output, and, above all, was very fast."

In 2003, Creo EMEA in Waterloo, Belgium (now Kodak) supplied Odessa with a Brisque RIP and Trendsetter VLF CTP unit together with VivaPosterize for MacOS 9.

"The Viva-Creo workflow solved our colour problem for us", said Mr. Orchin. "We used the colour mapping function to map spot colours to process colour plates, or map identical spot colours together, which we couldn't do before. From importing the job into VIVA to the output of the first plate takes about 5 to 6 minutes."

At the end of 2005, Odessa took delivery of the world's largest offset press, the KBA Rapida 205. The huge plates enabled an output of two sections per plate for the main poster formats of 12 x 3 metres and 6 x 3 metres, thus cutting down considerably on production run time. By the end of 2006 the production was already running smoothly and the company took delivery of an upgrade of the VivaPosterize software to MacOS X.

"It was among other things the speed and the simplicity of the whole process which impressed us," said Mr. Orchin. "With the new press we are putting two poster sections on one plate (2060 x 1510mm) and our production is increasing considerably with our Kodak/Viva poster workflow."

The success of Kodak's Prinergy Evo system with VivaPosterize in both France and Spain convinced Odessa that it was time to upgrade their RIP hardware. The migration from the old Brisque system to Prinergy Evo in November 2008 was completed comfortably in just a few days.

With Prinergy Evo and some adjustments to VivaPosterize to allow a full PDF-in, PDF-out workflow, production speed was brought to a maximum, with the added improvement in speed of transfer of the CIP3 colour files to the press.

"This new system has improved our production enormously," said Mr. Orchin. Where before it took several hours for the colour information to come to the press, we now need just 40 minutes for processing all 24 plates of a 48 Sheet poster as well as transferring the colour information to the press, so we are producing many times faster than ever before."