What is the better VDP?

[CSimpson]

If you were buying today would you rather Creo Darwin Pro with a free upgrade path to Creo Darwin 3.0 or would you buy XMPie uDirect Studio?

And does anyone know if you pay a maintenance fee with Darwin and receive upgrades or do you just buy the version of the software each time?

[X33]

I like Darwin Pro better because you can do Personalized Images and DDGs with it out of the box.

with XMPie, you'll need to buy more modules for those.

it would depend on the volumes that you will manage and performance needed.

[thebluesdude]

Hi, not quite the case we bought xmpie studio a few months ago and the studio already comes with Uimage and Uchart. The uimage is the personalise your name in clouds etc.
Very powerful, it is very good and already created a bang for us, but what they dont tell you is how slow it can be.
If your producing just variable text and colours its fine but the minute you start adding graphics processing it grinds to a crawl.
The tech guys suggest you drop the dpi of your images to 200dpi and batch your work into groups (in our case producing calendars) of say 25 units, which takes the file size to the maximum allowed in a pdf @ 2 gig and takes about one minute per page!! This is running on a powerful system of the fastest quad core pc 4 gig ram and twin terabyte raids!
The only way of producing faster data is to pay for the use of the Fiery or Creo vipp license...which is another £4000 + £1000 per year.

[jcbugs]

I would have to agree with X33. The only thing to think about is personalized images don't work with the current Mac version of Darwin, and DDG functionality is limited. Also, output and all around user-friendliness is far better on the PC version. I am NOT a PC person and to me this is the only part of Darwin that I have found so far that I don't care for.

[pcmodem]

If a customer were to give me a Photoshop document with a layer for variable text and filters applied to that layer.

Can Darwin/DDG hand this?

[CSimpson]

No, not exactly. The customer in this case would have to create an action script in photoshop from the point the text was last editable till the final version of the file. The customer would then give you the file from the point were the action script begins.

The way Darwin DDG works is that it will open the graphic file in Photoshop make changes to the text layer that is driven by your database then it will run the action script to in essence finish the picture file then it inserts that picture file into your print document stream.

[pcmodem]

CSimpson,

The text would still be editable if there were filters applied to the layer. Are you saying this still would require an action script?

[CSimpson]

If the text is still editable no action script would be required.

If the text is no longer editable the customer must give you the file when text was last edible and the action script that would bring the file to the finshed state.

[Gbane]

Have you taken a look at DesignMerge software for your VDP needs? It is Plug-In technology for Quark and InDesign, and runs on the Mac and Windows platform.

www.designmerge.com

[A.B Ula]

what about PlanetPress provided by Objective Lune .. is it a good one?