Reduce Media Waste with Nesting
October 07, 2024
How Nesting can save you over 20% on material costs
If you’re new to large-format digital printing, there’s much to learn. But one of the most important concepts you’ll encounter is nesting. Whether printing simple rectangular shapes or intricate designs, mastering nesting can help you drastically reduce media waste and optimize your production costs.
Taking just two minutes to read this article will definitely be worth your while!
What is Nesting?
Nesting is the process of optimizing the placement of multiple items of varying sizes and shapes on a printing surface. By grouping different images onto a single printing material, such as a sheet or roll, you maximize material usage, reduce waste, and increase production efficiency.
Nesting typically focuses on either rectangular or complex shapes:
Note that Nesting should not be confused with imposition. Read our dedicated article to understand the difference between Imposition and Nesting.
What are the benefits of Nesting?
- Nesting reduces material waste by strategically positioning and rotating images to fit within the precise width of the material, leaving minimal unused space. This is particularly useful when printing multiple images of various sizes and shapes.
- Reducing media waste will lead to significant cost savings across your production workflow, especially if you’re printing on expensive substrates.
- Additionally, nesting will save you time by making the printing process more efficient. If you have several jobs to print on the same media type, why not print them at the same time? You or your operators will certainly benefit from the reduced workload.
How to efficiently Nest your files before printing?
Many large-format printing professionals manually prepare their print layouts by using design software like Adobe Illustrator. Of course, it works— but this manual method is not the most efficient. Setting aside the fact that the final result is far from optimized, manual nesting is a highly time-consuming process that cannot be scaled. There’s only so many files you can manually handle each day.
Given the current demands of the printing industry—such as the rise of short runs, on-demand printing, and tighter deadlines—manual processes are now less viable than ever.
Thankfully, there are more efficient solutions. Dedicated prepress software such as Caldera PrimeCenter can help to streamline the nesting process. Whether you’re dealing with rectangular or complex shapes, tools like PrimeCenter can automatically nest a large number of files in seconds. They also include a variety of settings to accommodate different projects.
In our comparison video, we demonstrate the difference between a manual and an automated nesting workflow. Manually nesting stickers in Adobe Illustrator takes several minutes, while PrimeCenter completes the task in just a few seconds. Even better, PrimeCenter achieves a more optimized result with 30% less media waste.
Nested layout made with Adobe Illustrator
Nested layout generated by PrimeCenter
PrimeCenter: the best Nesting software on the market
PrimeCenter is a prepress software designed to help large-format printing professionals prepare their print-and-cut files more quickly and more efficiently. It features the most powerful nesting algorithm on the market, allowing you to generate optimized layouts in seconds. There’s no need to spend hours manually nesting files in your design software!
With PrimeCenter, you can:
- Automate the nesting process to create optimized layouts in seconds
- Scale your production by nesting files per customer or media type
- Go further than just nesting: PrimeCenter is a complete prepress toolbox that can perform preflight checks, automatically add cut contours, print bleed, cut marks or annotations to streamline your entire print-to-cut preparation.
Discover PrimeCenter
Do you want to speed up your file preparation process and reclaim your time? Are you looking to automate repetitive, low-value tasks? Do you need a solution capable of handling high production volumes?
Contact us for a demo of PrimeCenter tailored to your specific needs!
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