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Silver knockout is the silver part that shows through the artwork of the disc, as the example here. When designing artwork for the silver knockout, simply use white and indicate on your artwork the white areas will actually be silver.
When the discs are printed we will then skip the normal white base and print the art directly on the silver disc. Take note that any CMYK printing on silver will have a slight metallic look. It can be avoided if a special white mask is created just for the areas that do require a white base. To do so create a separate white layer and indicate it as a special white mask. Extra film charges might apply.
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The safest way to send CD audio or CD-Rom content electronically is saving it as a disc image. A disc image is a copy of a CD all wrapped in one file. Instead of sending the individual songs or tracks all you’ll be sending is one file. Once the image file is created, it is best to zip it using Winzip or Stuffit before it is transferred electronically to a FTP.
Here’s the step by step on how to do that in Toast (the version we have in this example is Toast 7)
1. First burn a CD and verify the contents are correct.
2. If all is correct insert the CD into the CD-Rom, open Toast
3. Click on Copy tab, Click on File menu and select Save as Disc Image
4. For audio CDs the file extension will be .sd2f, data content CD file extension will be .toast
5. Zip the file using Stuffit or other utility tools for upload
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This might be a bit confusing, the song and artist names that show up on iTunes, are they the same as the ones that show up on car stereo and certain CD players? There are 2 different methodologies here: CD-Text and ID3 Tag. CD-Text is hardware based with track information embedded on the physical CD. ID3 Tag is metadata that stores song, artist, album, genre, year, composer and other info about a particular song.
iTunes and other software audio player reads ID3 Tags from database such as Gracenote to retrieve song information, while certain car stereo, home stereo and DVD players can read CD-Text.
Both types of codes can exist on the same CD, to add CD-Text you need to have a CD writer and burning software that are capable of writing CD-Text. To edit ID3 Tags check out this iTunes Gracenote guide.
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MPEG/MPG: a video file format offering excellent quality in a relatively small file, a family of standards used for coding audiovisual information for the internet, DVD and other storage media. It is the compression standard for SD (standard definition) DVD.
MOV: MOV is a file extension used by the QuickTime-wrapped files, can be created by a variety of video editing software. MOV is a container format and can contain video, animation, graphics, 3D and virtual reality (VR) content or text. It can be used for internet video, or as uncompressed format in editing.
VOB: a container format in DVD-media. It contains actual video, audio, subtitle, menu contents of a DVD. It is created usually by the authoring program.
AVI: a multimedia format introduced by Microsoft. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback. It is usually found on internet video
WMV: is a compressed video format introduced by Microsoft. Originally it was mostly used for internet streaming. Its latest codec is one of the 3 video codecs in Blu-Ray discs.
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When you receive pdf proofs via email, what are you really looking for? Our artwork approval checklist has it all, but what about proofing for color? Can we trust the colors from the monitor screen and say that’s how it is going to print? It’s an obvious and big NO-NO.
PDF proofs are meant for checking font types, images placement etc, while it gives you some indication of color, it is not at all accurate in telling how colors will turn out. Each monitor is calibrated differently and therefore the same pdf will look different on yours and the person sitting next to you.
Whether you are printing just a few or thousands CDs / DVDs, you can always request a hard copy printing proof. This is how you can accurately tell the artwork will print on the production machines, and it is the only way to correctly proof color. Artwork can be adjusted if the proof reflects color differences.
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The ISRC is a unique international identifier for sound and/or music video recordings. An ISRC is required to sell music through a digital retailer – iTunes, Napster, eMusic, and the like.
The code is encoded at the mastering stage of the recording. In the case of music videos, the ISRC appears in the time clock for all analog formats and on the label outside of the box. The code is also included in the metadata when a song or video is delivered to a digital retailer.
This serves as a “fingerprint” for the song and plays a crucial role in tracking song sales and royalty collection.
Membership is free, and a log of outgoing codes must be kept in case of request from the RIAA. Membership form:
http://www.riaa.com/whatwedo.php?content_selector=whatwedo_is_r_c_codes
Digital distributors including CD Baby and Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) do provide ISRC codes to their clients at no additional charge.
