WHAT YOU SEE…AND WHAT YOU DON’T
Working behind the scenes
What is important to you when placing an order for a disc? Do you want the best price? Do you want it yesterday? Do you want it to look good and stand out from the rest of the discs out there? Perhaps you want all of these? My goal is to get you a great-looking disc every time, on time.
Daily I struggle with art files to get an optimal print possible on our discs. Each art file is unique and comes with special problems. Rare is the art file that sails through the room without issues. Unless the art is a one color, fonts-outlined, totally vector Illustrator file, I often find myself spending at least 15 minutes, if not more, on preparing it to print.
What do I do with your art file, you ask?
Before I send a proof I strip the file of any unnecessary extras which may cause problems during film creation or printing. I remove all live text, extra colors, templates, layers, and masks. The only items I want left in the file are the ones that are supposed to print.
Next I look for any issues that may come up during printing. Are we supposed to match any packaging pieces? Does the file contain halftones or solid colors made up of 4 color process? Are any colors out of spec and will it look terrible printed? I will also glance through the file and look at the spelling, the placement of art, or see if anything in general looks odd. I may see if I can find any better quality logos if the file contains low quality ones. Overall, I remove and fix all questionable spots to ensure a smooth print.
Then I fix the file to the best of my ability. If there are concerns with the file which will cause issues and I cannot fix them, I make my customer aware. This includes anything with color, quality of print, or low quality of files. Sometimes my emails get very long and detailed, but I want to make sure the customer knows precisely how the disc will print.
So you see, preparing the art is not just plopping something in our template and sending it on its merry way. Before the customer even sees the proof I make sure I know or fix known issues. When I send out the proof I will give all warnings and make sure it is understood how this file will print. I take enormous pride in our printing and the work that comes out of my room and want to make sure the best possible product leaves our building and comes to you.
printing specs & templates
Netflix Streaming: Improving the Quality of the Stream
I recently installed a Netflix Streaming Blu-ray player in a friend’s house. The idea seemed pretty seemless until you start digging into it. My first observation was the installation is not something a “non-geek” can do with ease. The player did not have the right firmware out of the box and we had to do a complicated USB download and installation (the USB stick had to be totally clear of any other files).
Once we got the correct software loaded on the player, it worked quickly. You queue up some movies in your Netflix account and select them on your on-screen menu and it starts to stream the video to your blu-ray player within 30 seconds.
My problem was with the quality. There was a “quality bar” indicator that showed us that we only had 2 bars out of 10. Apparently the quality of the video codec streamed to your tv depends on your connection. The streaming of the movies were terrible at 2 bars. Barely watchable.
Here are some tips from Netflix on how to improve the quality: http://blog.netflix.com/2009/03/netflix-trying-for-consistent.html
If you do actually get your player to work, at a watchable quality, you will come to know quickly that a very limited library is available for streaming. That was the most disappointing aspect.
As a videophile, I recommend not hassling with the above. It will likely lead to disappointement.
The Adobe ADOBE IS GREAT Corner:
Separations On-Screen
Continuing my “green” waste-not-want-not trend, I’d like to spend a moment on a cool new feature in
Illustrator CS4 and
InDesign.
In my area of the printing industry, everything gets trapped manually, and printing separations is crucial to verify that everything is printing as it is supposed to.
Our workflow is as follows:
- Strip file clean and proof it in our template
- Once it’s approved, trap all applicable colors and create films
- Check trapping on films and accuracy of text, photos, etc… and send on to make screens
During this process we were printing numerous separations before creating real films. Every time we noticed an error new separations were needed. This was wasting a lot of paper. It is also very difficult to see if colors are actually trapped until the films come back and you can hold them together and verify.
I had been playing around with InDesign CS2 for a while then, and noticed it had a separations palette. Instead of printing the separations on paper I could now view them instantly on-screen. Better yet, I was able to view the trapping between 2 or all colors right on screen. The Separations Palette also displayed the percentage breakdown of the colors when hovering the mouse over parts of the art. This palette can be found in Windows>Output> Separations Preview. In order to see the individual colors you will need to turn the view to Separations and then click on each color to see it individually. If you click on the arrow of the palette you can also play around with how the colors in your file will print.
This separations palette has been in InDesign since at least the CS2 version. I liked it so much I wanted it for Illustrator as well. I found a plug-in online that allows Illustrator to show separations. With CS4, however, the Separations Palette is now standard in Illustrator as well. This can be found in Windows>Separations Preview. Overprint Preview must be checked in order to view the separations.
The separations palette has become an invaluable tool in my department. We no longer print any separations out, which is saving us an enormous amount of paper. With each file change I can simply update in the links palette and view the updates on my monitor accurately and more precisely than I ever could on paper. It was this feature that finally convinced me to move from Quark Xpress to Adobe InDesign.