Uses Xinet Software to Produce Daily Magazine at Olympic Winter Games (January 24, 2002) For Sports Illustrated, the road to the Olympics started at Drupa, when the magazine's Technology Team began planning how to print a daily magazine at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. A year and a half later, the Sports Illustrated team is poised to produce a daily, 36-page magazine with cover art, eight to 10 ad pages and up-to-the-minute stories and photographs chronicling the 16-day Winter Games. Printed locally and distributed at event venues, hotels and the Salt Lake International Airport, the Sports Illustrated Daily relies on Xinet's FullPress and WebNative to help compress the production schedule of a weekly magazine into a 24-hour cycle. "The design process is built around FullPress and WebNative," said Sports Illustrated Imaging Director Geoff Michaud. "FullPress will generate low-resolution images of 150 photographs a day, while the designers will use WebNative to access the images via the Internet for page design." FullPress is powerful server software that integrates file serving, print spooling, and image replacement technology. WebNative is an asset management system that provides 24-hour access to production servers via the Internet. Working from the main Press Center at the Salt Lake Olympics, the Sports Illustrated editorial and production team is comprised of 100 photographers, photo editors, reporters and editors, and 21 film processors, imaging specialists and technical administrators. Edited by Assistant Managing Editor Sandy Bailey and distributed in conjunction with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, the daily magazine will contain Start Sheets for that day's events, a photo action feature of an event, pictorial spreads and editorial content from the preceding day. In order to get the printed daily magazine distributed throughout Salt Lake City by 5 a.m., the daily Sports Illustrated Olympic magazine faces a midnight deadline each night. Every day for sixteen days, the Sports Illustrated imaging team of five will scan and caption 150 digital and chrome negative photographs into the archival database, for use in both the daily and the weekly magazines. The photo editors will choose the images for the magazines, which will be scanned into a custom database, and the designers will use Quark Xpress and WebNative to lay out the pages. "Our WebNative interface is customized so the designer sees through a web browser whatever story and publication they are working on, and sees the photos that have been selected for that story," Michaud said. "When the designer is finished, the page comes back to Imaging, where we don't have to do any time-consuming photo replacement because it's a true OPI workflow," Michaud said. After the pages are converted from Quark documents into PDF files using Artwork Systems Nexus workflow, they're proofed and sent as digital files via the Internet to Spectrum Printers in Bountiful, Utah. Sports Illustrated began its Olympic training slowly over the last year, mapping out the details at regular meetings. The equipment - three Scitex Eversmart Pro II flatbed scanners, 10 G4 Macintoshes loaded with Photoshop and Quark, Artwork Systems Nexus workflow, Hewlett-Packard 10 PS printers with a CGS RIP, and an array of Compaq and Sun servers -- was trucked out and set up in Salt Lake City in mid-January. Sports Illustrated produced a daily magazine at the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games in 1996, but this time will be able to meet an earlier production deadline thanks to FullPress and WebNative. "The workflow is much more streamlined this time so we can work under a tighter deadline. Now our delivery deadline is two hours closer to the editorial close of the magazine and yet we can still get the magazine out," Michaud said. With offices in Berkeley, California, and Munich, Germany, Xinet, Inc. has been developing cross-platform networking software since 1985. Products include FullPress, WebNative, a web-based asset management and distribution system, WebNative Venture, which includes an integrated database, and a suite of server-based prepress workflow applications. Xinet will be showing FullPress, WebNative and WebNative Venture at IPEX 2002, Booth # 4-549, Birmingham, U.K., April 9 – 17. For additional information, call (510) 845-0555, contact [email protected] or log on to www.xinet.com.