Man, this may take a while...
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Originally Posted by vav
Currently we have a Composing Room and a Plateroom that our director now wants to combine into a Prepress Department.
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This is the traditional Prepress area (it usually consist of prep and platemaking, and with the advent of electronic prepress, it now also includes preflight).
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I'm not sure where to start or how to set up position descriptions for employees that will work in this new department. How does one breakdown who does the preflighting, checking customer-provided files, trapping, imposition/layout, proofing? I have 3 people in Composing and 4 in Plate. The platemakers have been doing traditional platemaking until we purchased the CTP. Very few analog plates are being used. At least 2 of the platemakers will need training in desktop applications and PC use. Composing staff is familiar with the desktop stuff. How do I break through the barriers of combining two departments? Suggestions for preflighting would be appreciated too.
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In most cases, the mac/pc /imposing operators can and should also do preflight. Since they are the ones that need this info, they know more of what is missing or wrong.
We have a dedicated preflight area in our room only due to the amount of work we do. In smaller shops, the mac/pc oper. is also preflight.
The platemakers only make plates and maintain the processors and related machinery (loading plates, cleaning processors, etc.) and QC plates before going to press.
Preflighting usually involves copying up all the files supplied by the client and then opening and verifying that all the parts and pieces are there (fonts, linked art, etc.). We use a piece of software called
Flightcheck. It works great and tells you all about your files from the colors in it to the resolution of the images and the fonts used.
This will probably get to be a busy thread, so ask more questions and we'll be more than happy to help you with details.
This is just a start.
Good luck,
David
