Star Discs Blog

There are sites with guidelines on how to lay out your artwork ready for printing onto a CD/DVD. These guidelines show you what the maximum and minimum print areas for CD’s, DVD’s, CD Booklets, CD rear inlays, DVD sleeves and Card Wallets.

The main things to look out for when you are creating artwork, is making sure it all fits according to the printers specifications. The standard size of a CD is 120mm x 120mm. You need to take into account that the disc has a centre-hole. Also, around the edges of the disc, there is a 1.5mm sliver outer rim, which needs to be taken into account. There is a tendency to put text on the design, which follows the circular rim of the disc. Be careful, as this may not print, which means you would have to reduce the size of the design.

CD Booklets – a couple of factors to bear in mind when creating CD booklets. As CD booklets tend to be inserted inside the cover of standard jewel cases, depending on the thickness of the paper used, the limit is about 28 pages. Otherwise, the booklet will not fit. You also have to allow bleed around the edges, as any text that is position near the edges, may be chopped off in the trimming/finishing process!

Rear inlays or tray liners – These are a little tricky, as you have a perforated spine to contend with. This wraps around the spine of the CD jewel case. This is why it is vital to follow any guidelines and use templates (see “Where to find templates”).

Where to find a CD or DVD Templates and Guidelines?

A lot of CD duplication companies display on their websites, how to layout your artwork. Some of them are downloadable for free. However, some require you to leave your details or register before you can use their templates. Other places to find out more about supplying print-ready artwork are local libraries, art and design colleges or your local printers.

Some have templates where you can just import your image or design onto. This will indicate whether you have the correct dimensions. There are PDFs available to download so that you can check you have laid out the artwork correctly. They will indicate how much bleed you will need to add to your design.

Dimensions for CD/DVD printing areas and Paper Parts

A Master disc is a disc that is supplied to a duplication or replication house for the information to be copied on to blank discs as many times as required. Whether it is audio, software, a presentation or videos. This disc is used as the “master” copy. It is loaded onto the CD/DVD duplication towers, which burns whatever is on the disc its hard drive. It then uses that data on the hard drive and duplicates onto blank media (discs).

A glass master, which is also known as a “stamper” is utilised to stamp all of the data pits into a CD or DVD – this process is called replication. It’s called a “glass master” because a circular block of glass is used, in which the data is pressed onto a special chemical coating. This glass block is actually bigger than normal size CD – 240mm in diameter and 6mm thick. The reason for this is because the discs need to be handled in a way so that the sensitive data area is not scathed or damaged. Even minuscule scratches or scathes can affect the quality of the discs to prevent this the glass master is polished until it’s perfectly smooth.

The milieu in which the glass mastering process is performed in has to be of the highest and cleanest quality. The room itself is a “Class 100” clean room (this is up to 12 times cleaner than an operating theatre). This room is designed not to allow more than 100 particles per cubic foot of air. Your typical working surrounding or office building consists from 500,000 to 1,000,000 per cubic foot of air – very interesting I hear you say! The main particles that can affect the quality of the glass master are dust, pollen and smoke particles.

The replication process takes a lot longer to complete than the duplication process. It is a cheaper but re-assuring method of copying discs. The duplication, although quicker, is dearer and not as quality assured as the replication process.

Some people like to email or upload data to duplication or replication houses for it then to be created as a master. I would strongly recommend against this as there is potential for the data to be corrupted during transfer. This may not be picked up until it gets to the end user. The duplication/replication house will then be held responsible for faulty data.

When dealing with audio masters you will find that production/record companies prefer to finance the creation of masters. This then becomes the property of the record companies. They tend to have an interest in building their catalogue of albums. They even go as far as not taking on independent artists if they have financed the creation of their master themselves. This deal between the artist and the Production Company is called a “spec” deal.

Before you submit your carefully crafted artwork for the label for the CD printing or DVD printing you are about to have duplicated, or the design for the CD inlay, backing card or booklet – here are a few tips to consider.

If you have included images that are in the RGB format they may look very different when printed on your CD label than they do on your computer screen. Maybe you RGB picture is showing green grass and a blue sky on a summer’s day, you wont be happy if the finished CD’s or DVD’s come back looking more like a brownish autumn day completely destroying the summers day image you had so painstakingly created.

This can happen if you do not format your file correctly before submitting it for printing to your chosen CD duplication company. When the printer prepares the artwork file for printing their pre-press computers will RIP the file, converting it into a language that the printers can understand. As part of this process your RGB colours are converted into CMYK colours.

Computer monitors use RBG colours making up the image on the screen by mixing red green and blue light, black being created by the absence of light. In printing the colours are made by mixing inks of different colours, CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, white being created by the absence of colour on the white paper.

Unless you embed a colour profile in your artwork the printer does not know how to make this conversion and has to use an average colour setting, the result can be very different than expected.

The answer is for you to convert the images yourself before you insert them into your CD or DVD artwork. This can be done easily in a program such as Adobe Photoshop. If the result once converted is not to your liking you can adjust the colours before using the image.

It is for this reason that many CD duplication companies will not accept artwork with RGB images. They want you to be happy with the result after it is printed and prefer to point out the potential problem before duplicating your CD’s or DVD’s.

There are several different file formats/programs you can supply your artwork for printing in when doing CD Printing or DVD Printing. I would like to just touch on a few most commonly used. Nearly all printers accept high resolution PDFs. You can use Adobe Acrobat to create a PDF file from your artwork. Remember to embed the fonts too!

The most commonly acceptable native file formats accepted are:

• Quark Express
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe InDesign
• Coreldraw

If you have photos or images to print then the following formats best suit these:

• TIFF (.tif)
• Adobe Photoshop (.psd)
• Illustrator EPS (.eps)
• Windows Bitmaps (.bmp)
• Corel Photo-Paint (.cpt)
• JPEG (.jpg)

It is strongly recommend that artwork should not be solely created in Photoshop. This program is ideal for altering photos and adding effects to images. Publisher and Word are also programs to avoid creating artwork in. If you do supply artwork in these formats, prepare to be charged for converting them into print-ready artwork. Establishments will charge for time spent. Therefore, do it yourself!

Your files should also be created in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) and at 300dpi resolution - as quality is important! Anything less than 300dpi will result in poor quality print. Remember that printers/presses can only print from artwork supplied.

Most print companies will have templates or guidelines to adhere to when designing specific artwork. These range from simple flyers, postcards, and posters to more complex manuals, DVD booklets, CD inlays & cover as well as CD or DVD labels. I will go into more detail about these at a later stage.

Also, other tips to look out for when supplying artwork for print are insufficient bleeds or safety margins. Bleed is extending any colour, image, photo or design past the cut line. Bleed also helps printers with a margin of error when trimming. Normally, it’s acceptable to add 2mm of bleed to your designs/layouts. The opposite of bleeds is safety margin. Placing an important header/title or image/photo right next to this crop line, then you risk it being slightly cut off. The recommendation is that you allow for 3mm inside the crop marks.

When talking about the future of CD duplication, DVD copying or just disc technologies in general, currently only one thing springs to mind…Blu-ray.

The name “Blue-ray comes from the colour of the laser used to read and write this type of discs i.e. blue-violet.

The Blue-ray discs can hold more data than a DVD because of its short wavelength (405nm). A DVD, which uses a red laser, has a wavelength of 650 nm.

As we know a whole DVD can hold up to 4.7 GB of data. One layer of a blue-ray disc can hold 25 GB. Dual layer Blue-ray discs can hold 50 GB. So, this gives you an idea of how far the technology has increased from our day-today DVD disc – a very long way.

It was a collection of several companies who specialise in; consumer electronics, computer hardware and motion picture production – that developed the Blue-ray disc. They are now known as the Blue-ray Disc Association.

Currently only HD DVD is competing with Blue-ray to be the leading carrier for high-definition content to consumers.

You will find Blue-ray technology in some of the latest game consoles available today e.g. Sony Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360