Axel Robert of Ubisoft talks about the importance of automating prepress

Axel Robert with Ubisoft talks about the company and the need to automate their prepress operation. Ubisoft, a maker of many video game titles such as the popular Assassin's Creed, has a distributed manufacturing and printing operation and the need for automation and consistency is critical.

Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink. And I’m here with Axel Robert, who is in Prepress with Ubisoft in France.

Axel Robert: In France, yes.

Cary Sherburne: Welcome, yes.

Axel Robert: Thank you.

Cary Sherburne: So we’ll notice a little bit of an accent.

Axel Robert: Okay, that's fine. No problem.

Cary Sherburne: Why don’t you start, Axel, by telling us a little bit about the business, about the company. How long you’ve been in business, how many employees you have, what kind of things that you do.

Axel Robert: Yeah, of course. Ubisoft is one of the most leading in the world. I currently, we are about 10,000 people works every day.

Cary Sherburne: Wow.

Axel Robert: For Ubisoft. But in fact, I’m the only one to do prepress currently. So you can say the gap between the people. So it was obviously for me to find a good solution, a good software solution to do all this kind of work.

Cary Sherburne: So automating things.

Axel Robert: To automate.

Cary Sherburne: So what does Ubisoft do? I mean, what do they do?

Axel Robert: Ubisoft is currently made video games all around the world. With a big, big fantasy titles like Assassins Creed or Rayman, the little guy who has hands and no arms , Far Cry 2, Animal, and a lot of games.

Cary Sherburne: But not...

Axel Robert: Nintendo DS for Nintendo DS.

Cary Sherburne: But no Angry Birds.

Axel Robert: No, unfortunately.

Cary Sherburne: So in your role is prepress then, you’re working with all of the documentation, the packaging, and everything that goes with those games when they go into the marketplace?

Axel Robert: Yes, exactly. I have work, I am in charge of all the printed material. So I need to check what the external critera ad agencies are made for us, and I am also responsible for all the printed material for our manufacturer and printer too. And we run all around the world., and not only in EMEA but also in USA, especially in Canada. The French part, Montreal. And Shanghai too.

Cary Sherburne: So it sounds like you’re a very busy person.

Axel Robert: Yeah, yeah.

Cary Sherburne: Yeah, and so I understand that you have used some of the EnFocus products including PitStop Connect, PitStop Server, and Switch to help automate some of the processes. So why don’t you tell us kind of how that’s changed the way that you’ve been able to work.

Axel Robert: Yes, in the beginning I started to work with PDF in 1999. Firstly it was Sony when our manufacturer, and very quickly we had a lot of problem with PDF. Wide kind of PDF problem made from new from which one exposition. It was very, very real and very difficult to have a good PDF . We always cross finger and waiting for printers. So I decided to find a better solution, than a human solution. I love human, but in production every day it was too difficult to solve all the problem when we encounter with kind of PDF . Because the graphic team, they always often always mess up these kind of technical parts.

Cary Sherburne: Fonts or the images are wrong, whatever.

Axel Robert: Yeah, fonts, information, good ICC profile. It’s another world for them.

Cary Sherburne: So thank you very much for sharing that with us today, and we’ll talk a little bit more later in more detail about what you’re doing.