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well, steph, i have never actually used remote director, but just by chance i saw it yesterday in a demonstration. while i cant give you first-hand working experiences on it, i can share a few thoughts i have on it.
first of all, when you sit down and hear how it is supposed to work, it sounds pretty impressive. the thing that really intrigues me is the ability to use it press-side for color oks. call me old-school, but with lighting conditions being so variable from shop to shop and color booth to color booth, im actually amazed that it can be kept consistent.
it seems to me that a major portion of the success of this product is having the correct hardware (mainly monitors and calibration devices) standard between all users, as well as similar lighting conditions. from what i understand, this product recommends having new, flat-screen monitors to really be color accurate. i was actaully provided with a list of monitors that are deemed "acceptable" (i think there was only 1 crt monitor that was listed), as well as a list of approved calibration devices (there was an x-rite, a gretag, and a few others).
what i liked about the software is that it prompts you and alerts you frequently about calibration, and lets you know if others on the network are not calibrated. the actual process of calibration sure looked easy enough, but in this demo, i never actually saw 2 different type monitors next to each other, calibrated, so im still a bit in doubt over how accurately the monitors are calibrated to each other. this is something i need to see to believe.
one amaizing new feature they are working on is the ability to take a sheet off of a press, scan it into the system, and view it in the remote director software, so that a customer can actually do a press color ok from the comfort of his or her own office. pretty scary stuff.
im not sure if any of this helps you, but i have to say that the presentation itself was very impressive, and if it really does what it is supposed to do, they really have a product on thier hands. it really could revolutionize the way we prepress guys do things, and im all for that. i cant imagine a world without hard copy proofs, but hey, they have to start somewhere. the single biggest hurdle this product will have is convincing existing customers to try it out. we have met a lot of resistance to using the soft-proofing solution we already have (rampage remote), and that is just for content proofs. remote color proofing is gonna be hard to sell at first, but once you can find one progressive customer willing to try something new, maybe that will be all it takes.
hope this helps somewhat
cr
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