Annoying artwork conversion

[Stephen Ingham]

hi mike, i had something simailar hapen to me when we first got our versacamm; it got so far through a print but it just stopped!! the only way i could do owt about it was to reboot the whole thing, it did this 4 times, printing about 2 meters of the print then stopping.

i contacted my rep at roland and he tried to blame my computer, but when we re-ripped it again it printed fine.

sorry no answers, but there we are

cheers
stephen

[Nigel Fraser]

Sounds like a corel issue Mike – I would try exporting your design as a jpeg and make sure the largest dimension is less than 10000 pixels (this is the limit of the export for corel) That should not resize any parts of your image. Or you could select it all and convert to a bitmap in corel first if you have problems with option 1 !
I nearly never export any files with images in as EPS’s from corel because it creates such huge files and causes problems like this.
One more thing you can try is to scale down your original file to say 1:10 scale in corel, then make sure all the bitmap parts are converted (together) to a suitable resolution bearing in mind your going to make it 10 times larger than it is, so say 1000dpi or so but leave any vector parts as they are and try exporting as an eps again. I’m assuming you can scale it up with the rip software?

Hope thats a little help ?

Nigel

[J. Hulme]

We suffer this problem and have to print and tile and rip individually, unfortunately you can’t with banners, there is a cure on the roland.dg boards but I can’t remember it, yep the converted machines suffer too, it normally throws a pass error up and stops, seems like the machine cannot digest huge information from the server all at once, just one of many problems with these machines. Buyer beware.

[Peter Shaw]

To avoid the resize to original problem you could grab the whole banner image and convert the entire thing to a bit map within Corel, then output it. It may however be huge!

You could also do the same thing a say 10% size and use the RIP to blow it up. If the RIP won’t do it, you’re stuffed !!!

Peter

[Kevin.Beck]

the biggest banner i`ve printed on the cadet is 3m x 80cm

exported as an eps, ripped in troop and printed no problem…..

[Stephen Ingham]

we only suffered the problem once and that was with an image that once exported as .eps was alomost 1gb in size, “so size probably is important!!”

[Chris Wool]

hi
because we can in coral etc. work at full size when we send out a eps its sent full size which seams to make very large files which i am convinced is the problem – having suffered this problem mays times 18 months ago i now send big stuff half or quarter size and expand in the rip no apparant quality loss nor cutting problems this combined with better hard disk space management seams to have cured the problem and had really forgoten about it

chris

[Shane Drew]

Mike. if you delete your print queue that is generated by the roland colorrip, I am pretty sure it will resolve your problem.

It is actually a problem with the cache. Colorrip produces huge temporary files, and some times you run out of disk space for the cache to work properly. If the cache is interupted, it stops printing at that point

I’ve had this happen all the time, but since doing the above whenever I have a long print, it has never happened again.

hope that helps mate.

cheers

[Alan Drury]

Just a thought but when you export as eps do you have the preview turned off, the preview is normally only used for positioning but can generate a proportion of the file size if its not needer for the rip don’t include it. If the file were to be imported into Quark for example you would only see a grey square but a postscript device would still print ok.
Alan

[Rodney Gold]

Mike , I also think its the huge rip files generated , a 1 gig + eps will generate 5-10 gig print files if printed at higher res.
The thing is , your question brings up a big point , that is to optimise the file initially for printing and save time on the RIP and not run into problems.
Banner can safely be printed at the lowest resolution and highest speed and a little banding is acceptable as it wont be seen from the viewing diustance.
Essentially you need to convert the file to contain about 15-25 pixels per cm.
Taking 25 pixels , the file should have been 10000 pixels by 1750 pixels and will generate a 45mb file if converted to a cmyk bitmap. As a JPEG the size will be substantially smaller , very manageable , the EPS file exported wont be nearly in the gig range and the whole thing should take about 12 mins at worst to RIP (with a decent P4) So you should resample the whole image to be at 15-25 pixels per inch (sometimes called DPI) and convert to a cmyk bitmap and export to eps and save as a jpeg.

I dunno if you do this , but ideally you should rip to a print queue and print from the queue once the whole thing is ripped and not do a simultaniues rip and print?

[magpie]

As somebody has already alluded to, if you work at full size then save with preview, the
preview file can be massive. Best to work at 25% as Chris mentioned and scale by 400%
through the rip, when working with vector files; or when working with tifs etc do as Rodney
suggests.

Cheers, Peter

[David Rowland]

Forget EPS, it is just crazy. I am a Corel user since version 3 and lay your job up on a page size that suits your 4000 x 700mm image, then select it and “Publish to PDF”, make sure your using PDF/X1, ZIP compression, covert all text to outlines and use Native colour.

The PDF will be smaller and handle better in the RIP software, it will RIP fairly easy and we get minimal problems this way, nothing reaches 1.2GB these days.

[Mike Grant]

Thanks for all your help guys. I managed to get it printed today. The corel file was 12mb and I scaled it down to 25% of the original. This still showed as a 12mb file, so I converted this new file to eps which had no trouble converting and gave a file size of about 2mb if my rusty brain remembers corectly 😕 then scaled it up to the correct size in colour-rip. This then took exactly 10 mins to rip, and printed almost perfectly. I say almost because I think I made a booboo and converted it as a RGB instead of CYMK and the red text came out a bit on the pink side. I need to do another one so will try the CYMK route and see if it makes a difference.

Cheers
Mike 😀

[David Rowland]

The colour problems can be the result of EPS and colour profiles within corel, your better off using PDF and then previewing the results in the RIP and Adobe Acrobat (reader) and then making your decision to print or not.

Scaling files within Corel is not reconmended, there are things like outline thicknesses that can scale wrong if set incorrectly, there is also exporting problems like the max 10000 pixel limit on certain EPS/TIFF/JPEG options, PDF publishing is the only way to use Corel correctly and print suppliers/printers sucessfully as PDF is a variation of EPS/Postscript standard. If however you have an EPS “Placed” in Corel, sometimes the Publish to PDF option fails and transparencys/shadows can play havoc with some designs but to use Corel with RIPS then use the Publish to PDF for time after time quick printing/quality results.

Glad you made progress, its late.. good night.