France Affiches' plant in Madrid

France Affiches, a leading French poster printer with plants in Paris-Antony and Madrid, has switched its workflow to Kodak's Prinergy Evo system in conjunction with VivaPosterize.

The creation and output of large format posters is very demanding and time-consuming. France Affiches, whose customers include Renault, Mitsubishi, IKEA, Air France and Telefonica, had 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.

According to Mme Fontana, the Director, "We needed a solution that enabled the output of the French and Spanish standard large formats such as 4 x 3 metres, 8 x 3 metres and 16 x 6 metres, that fulfilled the specific printer's requirements for the output, and, above all, was very fast."

France Affiches supplemented their machine room, which contains Harris and MAN Roland presses, with a Trendsetter VLF CTP system and the Brisque RIP workflow manufactured by Kodak (formerly Creo) with its European headquarters in Waterloo, Belgium.

The poster job was pre-RIPed to its final size on the Brisque, and then imported into VivaPosterize for tiling with the help of a special plug-in Viva developed in co-operation with Creo/Kodak. The tiling is completed in a few seconds, as VivaPosterize enables the entry of all the settings for the tiling, including overlapping and mark positioning, to be made in just one dialog. With the Viva plug-in, the job was exported back to the Brisque as an ICF file, and imaged.

With the increasing tendency to work purely with PDF files, it was decided to switch to the Prinergy Evo RIP supplied by Kodak. At the same time the PC version of VivaPosterize was installed. Now native PDFs are imported into the poster document, and the sections are also output as native PDFs which are sent to the RIP via the network.

In addition, France Affiches required the possibility of outputting poster sections of different sizes. In the production of a 4 x 3 metre poster, two of the eight sections are output to one sheet, thus saving a total of four printing plates per poster job. "This format and tiling accounts for a large proportion of our business in both France and Spain," said Madame Fontana. Although this functionality was not included in the original program supplied, VIVA was able to display flexibility by doing the additional programming at short notice and delivering the final version just a few weeks after the original installation.

In 2011, France Affiches took delivery of the KBA Rapida 205, the largest offset press in the world. With immediate effect the major formats are being output to the large printing plates (2060 x 1510 mm) to allow an even faster production. The company has also invested in a second CTP system to allow them additional flexibility.