The answers to everything duplication blog

Many customers love the shiny effect of the disc to come through the design. Silver effects can be printed on blank discs, replicated CDs or replicated DVDs. Here we’d like to bring up a few pointers for designers:

Example 1

Most discs (burned or replicated) have a clear inner ring (sometimes called a stacking ring). Essentially the canvas of the disc is not all silver, there will be a mix of silver and clear plastic. An example is shown here:

silkscreen printing on silver disc

Example 2

A workaround to the previous problem is to avoid silver of artwork to be around the center, or ask not to print in the stacking ring altogether:

Example 3

Printing full color image on silver can be interesting; all the white elements will appear silver, and since there is no white base, the entire image will look metallic as well, like our example here:

offset printing on silver disc

Example 4
If you are not a fan of the metallic look all over the disc, we can also apply a ‘partial white base’, meaning selective areas of the disc will have a white base coating. This will help bring out the expected color of the artwork, while still keeping the silver color coming through on other parts. In this example, a partial white base is applied underneath the England flag.

offset printing on silver disc with partial white base

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

Most music player programs such as iTunes and Window Media Player connects to internet databases such as Gracenote to retreive audio track inforrmation. So the trick is the send your CD information to gracenote so anyone with an internet connection using iTunes will be able to see the name of the songs, album name, year, genre etc.

Step 1: Put the CD in the computer so it will appear in iTunes. Go to iTunes, right click on a track to bring up the Get Info window. Enter as much information as you’d like, then repeat this step for all tracks on the CD.

Step 2: When all track information is entered, go to Advanced then Submit CD Track Names. It will ask you to confirm the Artist and Album information, verify then hit OK. The track information will now be sent to Gracenote. Give it a day or so for the information to be live. Test it out by putting the CD in different computers, the same track info should be showing up now.

Many clients ask how to insert special characters such as © (copyright), ™ (trademark) symbols in Photoshop or Illustrator. Here’s how to do it on a Mac and PC respectively:

Mac:

Step 1: First we are going to enable the special characters palette. Bring up the System Preferences menu, via Finder, then click on ‘International’

Step 2: Click on ‘Input Menu’ tab and check the ‘Character Palette’ box

Step 3: Now a symbol like an American flag should show up in the upper right corner, click on it and then click ‘Show Character Palette’

Step 4: Now the Characters window will appear, the © (copyright), ™ (trademark) and other popular symbols can be found under ‘Miscellaneous’. Browse through the other sets for foreign language characters. Once the symbol is selected, put your cursor where the character going to be pasted in the program (Photoshop, Word or others), then click on ‘Insert’ in the ‘Characters window’, whoa-la!

Windows:

Step 1: Go to ‘Start’, ‘Run’, enter ‘charmap’ in the text box and hit ‘OK’

Step 2: Select the font from the drop down menu, browse for the copyright symbol. Once you locate it then double click on click ‘Select’. Click ‘Copy’ to copy to clipboard. Now you can paste it into any program you desire (Photoshop, Word, Email, anything). Also note each font might have a slightly different set of special characters.

Before you hand off your DVD to a replicator, an important step is to sign off on the DVD master, these are just some of the essentials to look for:

• Platforms: Check the DVD master on as many platforms as possible, in a set top player (new and old, different brands), and on both Mac and PC. Never test the DVD master on a computer only, as it tends to be more “forgiving” as far as compatibility goes
• TV standard: check whether the title is NTSC or PAL on a TV set, a computer will play both PAL and NTSC
• Menu: it should starts up properly, all menu buttons should be functional, check for general flow of navigation
• Aspect Ratios: Make sure that the aspect ration look acceptable on both a 16:9 and 4:3 tv
• Video: Make sure that the quality is up to expectation, play it all the way through and look for skips and freezes
• Audio: Check for audio levels throughout the video and make sure it is acceptable

Proofing for artwork proof is an important step in the CD/DVD replication process. It gives you one last chance to see the artwork before it goes off to be printed thousands of times. Here is a checklist that might help you organize what needs to be verified:

• Bleed: make sure there is enough bleed, this is the area that is beyond the crop mark or trim lines
• Crop marks / Trim lines: look for crop marks or trim lines and make sure it is not cropping any important graphics or text off. If the artwork should bleed out, the graphic should continue beyond the trim. If the artwork has a white border, make sure to check the thickness of border is satisfactory
• Safe area: make sure no graphics or text is less than 1/8″ away from the trim or fold, or it might be cut off since the trim line will slightly shift during actual production
• Correct size: dimension of artwork should be correct, print and cut out the proof to ensure the right sizing
• Fonts / type: check to make sure correct fonts are displayed, whether it should be regular, bold or italics
• Text content: proof read all text to make sure there is no typo, however this should have been checked long before this step
• Correct images: make sure the right images have been used, especially when multiple revisions have been made
• Special effects: look for any drop shadow and transparency effects, make sure they show up correctly
• Spot colors: if any spot colors is used, it should be noted on the proof
• PDF artifacts: sometimes you might notice that the vertical strokes of certain letters such as ‘L’, ‘H’, ‘I’ might look thicker than the other letters. Usually this is a problem on the acrobat reader, and the way to verify it is the print the pdf proof out, it should be a concern if the problem does not show up on the actual print out.

These are our suggested minimum steps to verify we have received all the graphic elements correctly for print; if there are special requirements for your specific project, please check for that as well.

Remember, when you sign off on a proof, you indicate that everything on the proof is correct. If a problem is discovered afterwards it is likely that you will incur additional costs to fix it.

Next, we’ll talk about the different artwork proof options.