My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Here's my own little list. - Happy New Year all.

10.) Rapidly more affordable technology, from a variety of vendors, will continue to offer all levels of printers tools to compete.

9.) Workflow automation continues to increase error reduction, upping profitability.

8.) Printers will become increasingly aware that they are not married to the same provider of their CTP offset for their digital workflow.

7.) Printers and Tradeshops will realize that one way to save against wasting ink-jet ink is to properly colour manage output. The most expensive print is the one you have to do over.

6.) The printed, paperless society is not.

5.) Printers in North America will start using their access to internet technologies, (such as with EskoArtwork WebCenter), to open the doors of the Global Market to their advantage.

4.) As prepress vendors continue to offer formal access to their knowledge base, printers will start using consultancies from vendors to bring expertise into their shops as needed, thus sparking new life and ideas within their organizations.

3.) With better prepress and production tools, the Age of Waste is (should be) over.

2.) Prepress Professionals have an amazing capacity integrate and implement new ideas and technologies, and will continue to do so.

1.) The spirit of good will, cooperation, sharing, mentoring, and humor, ( such as found in these forums ), will help lighten and brighten our days in the New Year.

peter
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Great Blog mate
I love the "who killed the brisque" part
Thank you for the share
Adriano
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

The part about Brisque running on a Mac brought a tear to my eye. If only ...
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Printing companies will realize that there is much wasted time in prepress even with "automated workflows". And then they will ask "what about the other 2/3rds of the workflow?". Which they will then realize is where much labor dollars are wasted by jobs sitting around waiting for an operator to pickup because they're too busy doing something that's not making or facilitating making money. In which case they'll ask "how can I automate those tasks?". To which I'll reply "Gradual SWITCH!" And then we'll show them the benefits, the ROI and say "Get Kodak, Esko, Agfa, Xitron, etc to do that in their "automated workflows"!".

Are we wagging the tail or wagging the dog with "automated workflows"?

Was that a gauntlet I just heard?

:D
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

And maybe in 2008, people will start realize that any automated workflow is only as good as the guy who configured it and people will still do a minimal quality control on what comes out of these systems and stop blindly believing all these silly "Peddler Promises" that makes them think otherwise ;-)
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

That's why *YOU* configure it.... Not me...
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

As a 2 month owner of Power Switch, let me be the first to say, it works.
You have to think outside the box. You have to put a little time into it.
However, if you have ANYONE at your company that can write the slightest
code in Java, Visual Basic, etc, it can do back flips while juggling bowling
balls. (Do not get me wrong - it is powerful without scripts as well)>
As an example. What would you think of dropping folder XXX1234 into a hot
folder. That folder contains 10 .sitx files (or more or less).
Out the other end comes my six folders. Art, originals, fonts, trash, pdfs, etc.
However, you might say, "well, what does it do with duplicates? What does
it do with fonts?"
Duplicates - it looks at the art name (homelessman_1) and the date. If the date is
the same, it passes it through. If the name is different, it takes the name of the
folder above it (BRE) and renames to BRE_Homelessman_1.
Now, when I go to link I cannot find ANY of the Homelessman_1 files
because they are renamed. If I am in a BRE, voila, I link up to the one
with BRE in front.
Fonts - Passes the ENTIRE folder through with the name of the folder it came
from - ie, BRE_Fonts. Now, it puts ALL ten font folders into one FONT folder
and I simply drag into Font Reserve Server and let it sort it out.
All of these six folders are automatically put into a single folder called XXX1234
on my server. I hook up fonts and preflight within minutes.
I have not even begun to do justice to this ONE workflow. We think of a new
one everyday. (Postal Sort - I drop in hundreds of MAIL.DAT files). Out the
other end comes zipped up files that are in batches of 9 (proper names).
All I can say is, get a demo of this program. It WILL impress you.
Chris
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

And we've got over 200 seats installed in the US & Canada... If printers/publishers/etc in the sub $1,000,000 range and printers in the $1B plus range (and more) can do it, then anyone in between can do it...

Thanks for the positive feedback Chris.
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

That's what I meant Matt, YOU make the promises, I discover the truth. ;)
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Well, we've got one affirmation here on the thread and scores more around the country and world.

Have you bothered to "discover the truth" for yourself with the software or are you just being argumentative for the sake of arguing? I'd be happy to show you what SWITCH can do for your workflow. It's a free 30 day demo and I'll help you build workflows for your environment. We can even do an ROI analysis *with you* if you like.

Don't knock it until you try it...
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

I'm pulling your chain here Matt! Seriously, I don't know SWITCH so I don't have an opinion. My point is just that SOME automated workflows users blindly rely on their set-up without further quality control process. So whatever gets out out the box gets printed. I had my share of stories in 2007 supplying well-made specs-compliant PDFX1a to hundreds of publications/printers and sometimes get a surprise on the final printed result. In all problematic cases, the rip itself wasn't the problem. The problem was in the automated preflight-fixing process of the workflow (as encountered with Pitstop Server users and Asura users) and the way it was configured (removing overprints, KO black fills and so on). Don't get me wrong here, automated workflows are powerful tools (I'm a user of Agfa ApogeeX myself) but I make a point of carefully checking whatever gets out of it so, of course, I expect other people to do the same when they process my stuff. Now, are they acting like that because they've been told by their vendors that their system is 100% bulletproof? I don't know. As you may know, there is sometimes a wide gap between what you've been told (or what you've NOT been told) when you buy a system or a software and what you discover as a user. That is why forums such as this one are SO popular and helpful.
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Okay, that's cool. I couldn't tell that you were playing devils advocate. Apogee is automated, but only on the RIP side. What about the rest of the workflow before the RIP? That's where much time is wasted. We can take care of some of that.

If you'd like to at least see it I'd be happy to set up a webinar for you, and anyone else who is interested. I would be happy to relate some "generic" stories about work we've done around the country and world.
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Could I sing the praises of my RIP in here? Part of my automation workflow that we are
working on is to actually RIP through Trueflow. We then make an outline PDF.
I jokingly say that God himself could not change the flow of the text then.
(Of course God can, but probably nobody else on earth!)
I then send this ripped PDF to the client. As long as they are running Acrobat 8.1
with overprint set to on, then they see what I see what the press prints.
60,000 plates later I seriously do not have one issue to come back to.
That is why I saw Switch as such an integral part of our workflow.
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

Downloaded the PDF from the web site, seems to be pretty good. I've been Applescripting for almost 8 years now so that's what I use to automate pretty much everything that can be here, from the dumbest little task to more hardcore stuff.
 
Re: My 10 Fearless Prepress Predictions for 2008

PowerSWITCH for Macintosh fully supports AppleScript and JavaScript for extending functionality.
 

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