French print workflow specialist Caldera has announced the latest version of CalderaRIP is now compatible with the Trident cutting system range produced by Australian manufacturer Multicam Australia.
Multicam Trident 3.0 cutting system
CalderaRIP v15.1.2 is now compatible with the following Multicam Australia models:
Trident 3000 Series (2500mm length x 1250mm width)
Trident 4000 Series (3050mm length x 1550mm width)
Trident 5000 Series (4050mm length x 2050mm width)
“The Trident combines three different cutting technologies to provide maximum versatility by offering a choice of routing spindle and two knives which can be either tangential, oscillating, or a combination of both,” said France-based Caldera, which has been developing software for the digital print & cut industry since 1991.
“These flatbed cutters can be used for graphics & print finishing, point of purchase, sign making and even foam packaging,” it said.
Compatible with more than 1600 large-format printers and cutters from various manufacturers, CalderaRIP is used by thousands of print service providers to enhance their productivity and colour output. Fully scalable, it fits print operations of all sizes, and manages your fleet of devices from one interface to deliver coherent results across your fleet.
For print shops using several cutting devices from different brands, Caldera’s two cut management modules (VisualCut and GrandCut Servers) unify print & cut processes to help save production time. Both modules manage cut contours, cutting marks and positioning marks to enhance cutting accuracy and save time in finishing. They also generate machine-specific files for each job to ensure cutting precision.
Meanwhile, Omaha-based trade sign and graphics printer FireSprint has used Caldera PrimeCenter to solve a nesting bottleneck in its printing process. By installing the prepress software upstream from their RIPs, they were able to make substantial savings in time and material as nesting became almost three times faster.
Earlier this year, FireSprint moved into a new building. It took them a little while to get everything setup – they use Durst and Vanguard printers and have a couple of Zund cutters – but even once they were settled in, Preflight/Nesting Manager Derrick Freese realized they had a problem.
“We only had one person doing all of our nesting and it was taking many hours to get it done – up to 12 hours work a day in our peak season.” This caused a bottleneck in production. “Our biggest problem was not having a fully automated workflow. We would have to export PDFs and then drag and drop them into our program, do the layout and export the files, then drag and drop them again into the hotfolders they needed to be in.”
The solution was to install PrimeCenter – Caldera’s agnostic prepress software – upstream of the different RIP programs they were using for their different printers. PrimeCenter has been designed to allow print service providers to optimize their job preparation for digital printing and cutting. It provides automation along the print-to-cut workflow, so repetitive tasks no longer have to be done manually, saving time and avoiding errors, and resulting in less media wastage.
“Now we have PrimeCenter, it automatically imports the files that we need for our recipes and automatically generates the layouts,” says Freese. “What that means is big savings – we’ve been able to at least triple the amount of nesting that one person can do in a day. It’s gone from around 80 nest layouts to over 230 per day.”
Headquartered in Strasbourg, France, Caldera – a branch of Dover Group - also has staff in China, Italy and the United States.
