For Utah-based event advertising specialist Visible Marketing and its sister company, vehicle graphics experts Queen of Wraps, finding the perfect RIP solution to power their arsenal of 17 printers and six cutters was no mean feat. In though, the company ‘saw the light’ and implemented Caldera, and has not looked back since.

With so much equipment to handle, it was essential for Visible Marketing to choose a powerful and flexible RIP solution that could drive all the printers and cutters simultaneously without a hitch, and after limited success with alternative RIP software, the company settled on Caldera. «We’d never go back.» says Nate Griffith, [position] at Visible Marketing. «It’s increased our productivity tremendously. We don’t worry about crashes any more, it fits in well with our Windows-based network, and has a fantastic interface that doesn’t take much to get a new user up and running. Caldera’s SuperSpooler also allows us to monitor a large print environment and all the jobs in the workflow effortlessly.»

Running a combination of VisualRIP+ and GrandRIP+ plus numerous optional modules, including VisualCUT, VisualUser, NestOBA, AddDriver and CostProof, Visible Marketing makes extensive use of the master/slave set-up afforded by Caldera’s RIP solutions. A total of 21 PCs are used to load print jobs into the system and run the printers and cutters, and Griffith explains that since switching to Caldera the company has seen a huge improvement in productivity. «We had five printers attached to our previous RIP.» he says. «It would crash several times a day, bringing all printing to a stop and resulting in wasted time, media, and lots of frustration. We don’t have this issue with Caldera. We’ve increased productivity by 30-40 per cent through efficiency gains, as well as a dramatic decrease in reprints, which ends up saving a lot of money.»

Speed was an important consideration when Visible Marketing went in search of a new RIP solution, so the RIP&Print functionality of VisualRIP+ and GrandRIP+ has been a boon for the business. «No longer do we have to wait for the RIP process to happen prior to printing.» Griffith enthuses. «You can throw a whole roll’s worth of images into a nest and hit print in less time than it would take just to RIP a single file on other systems.»

«Tiling is straightforward, fast and easy.» Griffith continues. «We can drop file after file into the software to cut tiles, and have results in seconds. No screen refreshes, no having to wait for images to rotate.» Given the grand scale of some of the work produced by Visible Marketing, quick and easy tiling is a vital component of the Caldera RIP, as is the Layout & Compose feature which allows users to merge, nest, stitch, rotate and combine multiple file formats so that building double-sided flag files, for example, can be completed as part of the print preparation process rather than being passed back to the designers.

Another particular attraction of the Caldera software for Visible Marketing was the integrated Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE). The company has 15 user licenses for APPE and makes extensive use of it, so knowing that they can rely on the Caldera RIP to process the files with speed and accuracy is crucial. «There is no stumbling over transparencies and other common PDF challenges resulting in reprints. What’s in the file is what gets printed.» Griffith states.

«It’s gratifying to know that switching to Caldera has so vastly improved Visible Marketing’s day-to-day productivity.» says Sebastien Hanssens, Vice President of Marketing and Communication, Caldera. «It’s a story we hear time and again from our customers, but we don’t rest on our laurels: we’re continually developing new and better ways to make printing easier for everyone.» Griffith says he would ‘most certainly’ recommend Caldera’s RIP solutions to other potential buyers. «It is fast, it is intuitive and it is accurate.» he states. «Color is great with EasyColor and EasyMedia, support is phenomenal – though we don’t have to call upon it that often – and the product itself is brilliant. In the first couple of months alone Caldera more than paid for itself.»