Hey Monkey!
Well our custom base is pretty low-tech. So getting something in PDF is the most we can hope for sometimes. I'd like to go with an RGB colour managed workflow - converting at RIPing time and in fact, the main prepress/designer actually has been using the Refine PDF Convert to CMYK and says the conversion is excellent, giving him great conversions and saving him time in editing. The source images are from Dlibrary for catalogue work.
I actually didn't ask him, he simply mentioned that today in passing.
Now if you have a "Group files" task in there that waits for 16 pages and you only supply 5 through the Evo client, it won't alllow you to add the other 11 to that job. Well OK, I don't know how to do that at this point. I usually drag the entire 16 to the template and let it run. However, I tested today with a hotfolder attached to the same Queue and it will allow partial supply of pdf's to the folder. IF you keep adding them, they will add it to the queue.
Haven't tested it for naming convention/page numbers and run list alignment yet. Again, we usually just supply the entire document to the Evo system.
Again it can fully automate standard jobbing work very easily(with intervention where you like it). Now if you've got a magazine job which is a mixture of black & white sections and CMYK sections you have to intervene more. You can still get it to fully automatically impose, but you'd need to pay attention to where you partial signatures fall. In fact it might be a case for preps™ manual imposition. For example, if you've qouted 4 pages of CMYK in a Work & Turn situation on a 4 up press, you might need to put the work & turn at signature 5 of 8, instead of normally 8. (with the normal option of "Place Partial Signature "0" signatures from end"). Other wise you might get a work & Back section with 4 pages of black & White and 4 pages of CMYK. Meaning you have an extra 4 plates and redundant black sections on a CMYK run.
You can at last stage, select which separations you want to output. Just the black plate or Map your spot colours to another spot, or convert to CMYK. OR even as Insane as map another Process colour to another Process colour. I believe even, map a Cyan to a Spot if you like.
However, if you have a CMYK section that you want to go as Black, mapping the other separations to Black only gives a very dark and shocking result. (of course). So you might need to Refine to PDF (works with PDF's aswell as postscript) to convert those pages to Gray first etc.
What is good however, is that it determines how many separations there are based on content, NOT your colour bars. So if you have a grayscale PDF, imposed in a standard Preps™ template with all the CMYK furniture. It will still show only a single black plate to be output. Very subtle but handy feature.
Means you don't have to always switch off the CMY channels. Other late stage edits you can make, are applying what Curve you would like on output. Position on imposition on plate. (X or Y coordinates etc)
BTW, We had a CTP technician here at one stage and he asked me whether I had any live work to output once he was finished. So I booted up Evo and began processing some work. He asked me what the software I was using. I said Prinergy Evo. He said, "I've done a course on Evo and I didn't even know it could do that!" Basically it was the automation part of it with workflows. All fairness to him, he's the engineer for the hardware, not the workflow guy. So yeah it's pretty impressive.
