Quark layout names on film instead of File names

[Lammy]

Not to step on Jane's toes. . . But as a workflow I'd rate RAMpage as one of the top in the class. Nexus seems to be right up there as well these days. It does have inline trapping. It's a page based workflow that uses application based OPI which makes for faster output files. I can typically export multiple page jobs in under a minute, add them to the rip queue and be onto the next job. It does work well with preps though I don't use it myself. Being a page based workflow it means that you can rip and strip 15 pages on a flat while waiting for that last change to the 16th page and not hold up any production. As for cost, I was quoted a complete system with a used imagesetter and processor for right around $50K about a year ago.

Your best bet it to find someone close to demo it for you.

[tequillajane]

Being at the bottom of the crap hill around here, I don't know about the original cost, but they were running it 2 years ago when I climbed on board, now I would't want to be without it. And yes to Preps, we are on the newest one for OSX, I think it's ver.5

It also works great on our network, no MAC/PC conflicts... We are all on MAC and I believe it runs on PC, but will recognize all of our linked fonts and artwork across the network just fine.

In addition to setting up special inline trapping profiles for various customers, you can also rip to a trap cue, then go in and manually trap each peice of a vector page.

As far as problems, they are few and far between, but they do occur from time to time with a weird line apearing, or a page that can't rip under a normal profile that it should, but after all, this is printing...

I give it a THUMBS UP! -

[petewill222]

Thanks Jane...

Unfortunately we recieve a lot of PC Files... i.e. Word, Coral, Powerpoint.. and believe it or not people actually want to print from these files??? But on our current Rip and workflow we have a lot of problems with RGB's & Black's being in 4 Colour Black in stead of genuine black, does Rampage sort these kind of problems?? How is it with Spot Colours too???

Pete

[Lammy]

It does fine with spot colors. RGB blacks will still give you a problem and will have to be fixed in the original application. The queue manager only runs on a Mac right now too so if your a PC based shop you'll need at least one Mac so you can manage what's ripping and do any custom trapping.

[petewill222]

No we are a Mac based company but we get loads of PC CRAP!!!!! Its driving me wild... But thanks anyway... Sounds interesting... What formats can you output to... PDF's, Eps's, Hi Res Tif files, 1 Bit Tif Files, can you output CIP3/4 files??

[tequillajane]

We actually have a few ways for that,

1 - we can usually fix it in the application, usually best if Cust supllies files to use, but often NOT the case
2 - we have a conversion profile that will convert RGB black to 100%K - only have slight trouble if it is a RGB gray converting to Black, it will make CMYK build to mimic the RGB values
3 - we can PDF it and fix in Pitstop

[Lammy]

The most common export is to an EPS. The system will accept all those formats though. Yes it will do CIP3 not sure about for. It's also do some press specific formats as well
http://www.rampageinc.com

[petewill222]

We do that in Pitstop at the moment but our RIP sometmes finds that the image within a PDF was once an RGB and converts it to this random Greyscale which looks terrible even if the file has been changed to CMYK.

How do you find the trapping??

[tequillajane]

I think it does an extensive amount in Manual trapping, as we need to be able to do it with our Flexographic press, but we have most of it built in to the normal everyday profiles, we only have to manually trap for special jobs or problems.

[Lammy]

Same here, Out of 100 jobs I might have to alter the traps on 1.