NEW YORK, December 13, 2007 - HudsonYards, a leading provider of visual media services to all markets has made a major move upstream with the introduction of its new Studio Services division. This division provides the industry's most complete support of the creative process through to the execution, implementation and distribution of electronic mechanicals to printers or other media providers.
Studio Services represents HudsonYards' move to be adjacent to the creative process by facilitating a mechanical creation workflow. "Our clients give us a rough layout, or a basic mechanical, or simply a series of guidelines to follow based on their brand requirements, then we version it out for different sizes, different languages or different products," explains HudsonYards President and COO Diane Romano.
This initiative represents HudsonYards' commitment to provide the New York Metro region with an off-site partner that links its technology savvy with it's strong suite of creative support.
Coty Inc., the world's largest fragrance company, is a major corporate customer. HudsonYards prepares mechanicals for their packaging, scented inserts and point-of-sale signage. HudsonYards also manages run of book ads for Coty in national consumer magazines, and retouching services for images used in sell books.
 While its production facility is headquartered in Manhattan, HudsonYards actually has been providing these and other services for a number of years at customer onsite locations. One such operation is based at the Connecticut offices of a global, upscale beauty products and services company. It is an in-house studio where HudsonYards employees produce packaging mechanicals for the cosmetics company. The end product that HudsonYards delivers for them is an Adobe Illustrator document with the high-res image in place, along with all of the die-lines for the packaging converter or printer.
The HudsonYards facilities in New York, Nashville and San Francisco provide the entire spectrum of prepress services including color management, proofing and creative retouching for these and other clients across the country. Studio Services integrates the whole process of mechanical creation, prepress, execution and digital asset management using collaborative tools like Acrobat, Remote Director or Virtual Matchprint.
"What makes our offering unique is that there aren't many others in our space in the industry who provide these services in addition to the wide spectrum of other services we provide," says Neil O'Callaghan, executive vice president of technology and operations of HudsonYards. "And that gives us an edge - particularly with corporations, or smaller sized agencies or design firms that want to do concept but don't want to invest in studio staffing."
"After the creative development process, is complete" O'Callaghan adds, "we pick up the ball from the comp and start creating all of the different versions and aspect ratio and scale changes for all the other elements of a campaign. So they can say to us, 'here is a layout for a vertical, and a horizontal application of this image, and here is a media plan for everything that we plan to do. Make a mechanical for every single one.' And we do it."
In the strategic link of services, retouching is a centerpiece because it's the hardest thing to do well. O'Callaghan points out that there is a limited number of very talented professionals in the retouching field and the demand is intense for good quality work.  HudsonYards has the depth of resources to provide that studio work for any client, including overflow work for individual agencies.
"But we start working on client projects even further upstream than retouching," O'Callaghan says. "Before shooting starts, we coordinate with digital photographers to make sure they will deliver what we need, without interfering with their creative vision. Then with the visual input, we start building mechanicals in our Studio."
"We're expanding upstream in the market with smaller companies, enabling them to tap into high-level professional services without building the extensive infrastructure to do so themselves," O'Callaghan notes.