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OPI in the Advertising Production workflow
Nigel Oswald, I think it was, asked an interesting question once on whether OPI was still being used in production since network speeds have increased and become so robust.
I can say from my experience in retouching houses and advertising production shops that for the most part, OPI has suffered the same fate of the Syquest drive. Even when you consider producing a Fuji proof or Kodak Approval from a 300mb retouched image for loose output, the users in these shops have relied on printing HiRes instead of OPI. It's become a non factor. Another reason usage stopped was a lack of internal support. The OPI swap wasn't 100% every time. Operators lost confidence and could rely on printing HiRes.
I'm sure there are houses that do rely on and still use OPI. But where is this happening? Who's is taking advantage of OPI and why is it still viable?
--Eric Hegdahl
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OPI is a loosely used term. In its purest form, it is closely aligned to a legacy PostScript workflow, no matter the brand or flavour of application. This is often where the problem arises, as the PostScript is VERY strict in terms of the tagging and the swap out.Systems with very rigid workflows are often unfriendly beasts so it is good to see that Xinet is working on removing the necessity for legacy postscript code to facilitate the "swap-out". Other vendors have been using an "OMIT" command, which is very quick and clean.Obviously, when InDesign came along, the Flattener "wrecked" everything. It pretty much killed OPI.With intelligent architecture, Xinet have provided a mechanism to swap out based on locating the file using the unique ID, instead of relying just on exact file path and file name. This has eliminated the anomalies of "missing" highres inthe final output.So it remains to be seen how successful the new "PostScript free zone" will be!
Since we have locations in different cities it is pretty vital that we use OPI. Also, since we print (I know, so 2000) mass quantities for proofing we rely on OPI to speed the printing process. While we will be moving to softproofing one of these days (Xinet & Dalim) we are not there yet. We will be implementing all of this over the next 18 months and I hope to use all the experience here to help us out.
I'm always interested in people's perspective regarding OPI. My background is in production and I can't really imagine printing a hires file when it can be printed using OPI. That being said, you should be able to realize some real value if you build via OPI across different locations and print locally.
In a previous life we had production in Florida but printed in NYC. Florida built the work over a VPN linking to the OPI volumes. It was a nice little setup.
Best of luck to you too with softproofing. Once we had dialed out Cinema Displays to match our Kodak Approvals we were able to immediately cut internal proofing 25% right at the beginning. As long as you have the work to support it, it's a nice workflow.
Eric Hegdahl
President, XUG
Marketing Technology Officer, Graphic Systems Group
Just so I understand what this discussion is about, when you say "OPI," do you include the FullPress FPO image replacement workflow?
We use OPI internally using the PDF image replacement workflow (no more .ps workflow) and have also trained clients to download FPO, make thin PDF and upload into our prepress workflow. We have a number of clients in the fine art market that use very heavy files resulting in book project sometimes in excess of 100GB. I can't imagine a workflow without FPO and would not consider a prepress workflow unless it supported it in some way.
If you get me gigabit between my site and my customers we can talk about throwing about OPI.
When using FPO's in InDesign CS3 and exporting PDF with Omit for OPI (ticked on), the result, after image swap, scaling and USM, is showing a gap on top and to the right of the image and the 1/2pt black frame. If you don't omit for OPI, you get the image swap, but no USM, (not ideal). The images in question have been placed in InDesign at about 99% of original. I do have a small PDF that shows this defect. I'd appreciate any help in this regard. Thanks.
Being in an agency environment we do not use OPI as such, but we do use FPO all the time. We do all of our own in-house retouching, with a lot of "out of home" campaigns (Billboards, Transit Shelters, etc.), and the size of images averaging about 300 - 500 MB, and many much larger ones also.
Without FPOs our work flow would be considerably slower, and I worry that the possible elimination of OPI from the prepress environment may eliminate FPOs as well. In the agency environment you are making multiple sets of revisions on every file and generating numerous lasers and low res PDFs that are only for content and do not require high resolution images. FPOs and Picture Wrangler are very important components of our workflow, and the main benefit of the Xinet FullPress system for us.