I'm looking at buying Directype for some VI campaigns and am curious how people who use it like it?

How hard is it to make 500-1000 custom images? Does it take forever or is it quite fast?

Can you control the file naming much?

How hard is it to set up your own custom motifs and fonts?

Is it worth it in the end?

There is a demo that you can download, Patrick. I downloaded it just to see what the program was like, but I didn't have time to check everything out. It seems to be pretty straightforward. Much like Adobe Photoshop. There is also a feature where you can create your own images and save them as "letters" in a font. You would have to create a different image for each letter (this is how the Easter egg motif was created). So you would have to create an image for each letter of the alphabet (caps and lower case) if you want to go that route. You don't have to use this feature, but it is the most attention grabbing. They have another program (or module) that does the merging so I'm not sure how flexible the naming conventions are.

We are still learning the basics of Digital Printing in color, so DirecType will be put on the back burner for awhile. Also, I thought the pricetag was a little steep considering some of the processes can be achieved in other programs much cheaper (of course, the only price I could find was in Euros so I had to convert the currency - approx. $6,000). It would just take a little programming to achieve the some of the same effects.

Here is the link to the demo software:

DirecType Demo Page

Kevin

Thanks Kevin, I did download the demo, but unfortunately it doesn't give you any idea of speed of creation of each "record" image or how it exports.

Plus on a personal side, I hate crippled demos. Show me the full version and restict its use in time frame, heck make me get a daily registration key if that's what it takes, but don't cripple the demo. Crippled demo = crippled software, IMO.

I'm still interested in it, but I need to know how fast it can process say over 1,000 images in how long?

Patrick,

speed really depends on the following:
- how fast your processor works (2 GHz, 3 GHz, ...)
- the amount of RAM
- the speed of your hard drive
- and of course the size of the images

As you can see on the DirecType homepage they offer:
- DirecType Designer (where you actually only design the template and can output one by one picture)
- DirecType Creator (Batch processing with user interface)

They also offer a so called DirecType command line tool, which will speed-up the output even more.

If you want to you can create a template and send me the template, a excel list with names and pictures and I will run it on my machine to give you the output speed.

Keep on mind that once created your personalized images you need to somehow 'connect' them to your VDP tool. Darwin from Kodak Creo just released a new version of their VDP application which has a seemless DirecType integration.

If you are using Fusion Pro as a VDP tool I could point you to a kind of excel macro where you will have a easy to use user interface to 'connect' your DirecType images with Fusion Pro.

Cheers,
deltaE