CD Duplication – The 7 Deadly Sins You Need to Know
OK so I admit that these pitfalls may not be on par with genuine deadly sins but this article will look at the things you need to know before embarking down the road of CD duplication.
1. Printing the wrong artwork
OK, so it seems easy on the face of it. You get supplied some artwork and you print a few hundred discs with this artwork. But artwork gets changed. The rule is the more people are involved the more it gets changed. Sometimes it even gets changed back to what it was before the changes. Somewhere a scientist has come up with the formula, something like n=(p/d)X q where n is the number of changes, p=people involved in project, d is number of days to deadline and q is the quantity of discs required. As a result it is very easy to print the wrong artwork so a rock solid proofing process is essential. PDF proofs need to be signed off and checked against the first print coming off the printers before the CD duplication process can proceed.
2. Duplicating the wrong content
Another one that seems very easy on the face of it. Often, though the content for a disc goes through a number of iterations in the same way artwork can. This can lead to incorrect content being duplicated, but there are plenty of other ways for this to happen. Artwork discs have been known to end up duplicated, as have masters for other projects. Duplicating towers with the ability to store multiple masters are also a recipe for disaster; it’s all too easy to select the wrong hard drive image.
3. Colour matching issues
It’s often said that CD duplication is easy; getting the print to look good is the hard part. Key for CDs required for marketing purposes is the necessity to be on brand. This means primarily matching colours to a brand’s Pantone or CMYK values. It also means checking fonts are also in the set of approved client fonts and even details as small as the distance between logos and text. Print method will often be determined by the type of artwork and this may limit issues like colour matching or font sizes possible.
4. Print resolution issues
As print is the primary factor in differentiating a good CD duplication run from a bad one the issue of print resolution is very important. Text should ideally be delivered as vectors allowing the RIP to flatten at the last stage. Explaining to a client why their artwork designed in word that looks fine at 72dpi will look poor when printed at 300dpi or above is a difficult concept to get across. Often the best plan of action is to print to paper and look at the results. If this course of action is taken it’s important to explain that the print on paper will not necessarily look the same as the print on the disc.
5. Unplayable Discs
Although CDR media reached a high quality plateau some years ago, DVDR media has improved greatly since general purpose DVDR took over from the very expensive authoring grade media. Quality and compatibility with players of the majority of DVDR brands is very good these days. Despite this there are still unscrupulous dealers who will purchase rejected DVDR stock at knock down prices and sell them as cheap duplication stock. This stock will often have an inferior dye that although is readable on some players will be rejected by others. A good indicator of quality is the depth of the purple colour on the DVDR data side. The darker the better – avoid pale dyes. Print surface quality can also change without notice so even a DVDR that is acceptable one month may change when the next batch is manufactured.
6. Masters not loading
With more and more companies attempting the important stage of CD master creation and DVD authoring themselves there are often issues with errors on masters. Data integrity errors can sometimes result in the disc playing back fine on some players but a CD duplication tower will be unable to read in the master and make a disc image. Re-authoring the DVD using the using an abstraction layer editing application like DVD After Edit or PGC edit is usually the way to fix these data errors.
7. Format errors
It seems pretty straightforward and obvious to most that you need to supply a CD master to duplicate CDs and a DVD master to duplicate DVDs. However, probably due to the blurring of the distinction between CD and DVD duplication, a master will often arrive in the wrong format. CD data supplied on a DVD is usually a matter of re-burning the data on a DVD though care must be taken as there are differences in the file naming structures of ISO and UDF data formats (CD and DVD disc formats respectively). This can result in links between files not working due to names being truncated. Sometimes discs written as “packet data” are delivered which are not useable as masters due to these not having the table of content information correctly written. Finally another common error specific to the audio CD duplication process is masters being delivered as mp3 or wav files. These will play fine on a PC but will not work on the majority of CD audio players.
Don’t be put off by attempting your next CD duplication run in house, most of these errors are easily overcome with careful quality checks and planning. If however you are going to put the work out to a professional duplication company make sure that you chose a reputable company that will look after your work and deliver high quality discs without cutting corners on stock and printing. This may mean not going for the cheapest quote you get, make sure you look for established companies with a good track record.
Jonathan Moore is an expert on USB, CD and DVD duplication.
More information about promotional USB sticks at flash-duplication.com and CD duplication at 10th Planet Digital Media.