“Rhapsody’s desire to constantly improve and evolve their Emagine system
gives us a real advantage in the marketplace”.
Nathan Eaton-Baudains, Group Account Director – Illustrated London News
No matter what technological challenges your business faces, now or in the future, we’re here to help.
In Emagine, we already have what we believe is the finest digital asset management system money can buy – a system built by us on the basis of 20 years’ experience working with market-leading clients across a broad range of publishing disciplines.
From consumer magazines and books to custom publications and mail-order catalogues, from traditional print to digital delivery online or in app format, Emagine will help your creative team, ad sales people and clients keep track of a publication from the time it is page-planned right through to the moment it is sent to print.
Assets uploaded to the system are available for users to access at any time, anywhere in the world, including your clients and authorised third parties. The originals are stored in high-resolution format on our ultra-secure and totally future-proof servers, so you don’t have to worry about archiving them in-house or distributing versions to third parties. At a time of rapid and seemingly never-ending technological change, that alone is a service worth paying for – and is a lot cheaper than having to constantly upgrade your in-house servers.
Emagine also makes the assets readily available to Rhapsody’s colour management team for profiling, colour balancing, retouching and tagging with metadata.
Each operation performed on an image automatically updates the relevant files throughout the system, ensuring that you always see the most up-to-date version. Details of the work, and the cost involved, are also automatically logged into Emagine, and can be checked at any stage.
InDesign page layouts are automatically uploaded to the system in the same way as image assets, enabling designers and editors to harness the power of Emagine right from the moment an issue is page-planned.
Our new Adobe In-design plug-in, combined with Rhapsody’s existing Xinet Technology, allows you to drag and drop lo-res positionals from Emagine’s asset management system straight into your page and then upload completed layouts to the system without ever having to leave InDesign. As you upload a page, the plug-in automatically links the associated assets with the high-resolution images, packages them, and makes them instantly available to subsequent users. At the same time, the page’s current status becomes available for viewing in wireframe or thumbnail versions of Emagine’s electronic flatplan, so you can watch the issue build page by page.
Even better, when pages are moved on the flatplan, the asset packages travel with them, saving hours of laborious manual updating. The plug-in also tells subsequent users if and when existing layouts are available for editing, avoiding the risk of working on duplicate files. And when edited page layouts are returned to the system, all the assets and flatplan views are automatically updated, along with a record of every change made to the page. How’s that for service?
Advertisement artwork follows much the same process as page layouts. Once it is booked into the system, a piece of artwork can be moved around the flatplan at will and is automatically tracked wherever it goes, along with all the relevant back-office information. Emagine has already helped UK magazine giant IPC to streamline its ad-booking and production processes. It can do the same for your business, too.
Soft proofing in Emagine is simplicity itself. At your command, the system will generate online PDF proofs to your own specification at any stage in the production process. It will then automatically email authorised users a link enabling them to view and amend those proofs and keep track of the changes version by version. It will even generate page-turning proofs for E-editions or stitched PDFs for client and management presentations.
Certified hard proofs to any conceivable specification can be ordered up in the same way and run out on the latest high-end equipment by our asset management team for dispatch to anywhere in the world.
Sending to print is as seamless as the rest of the process. Emagine automatically configures the assets to the required specification and pre-flights the files before it sends them to your chosen printer or E-platform provider. If there’s a problem, the pre flighting software will warn you instantly – so when you click ‘file to print’, you do so safe in the knowledge that your files are to exactly the format specified and that there will be no come-back from the printer down the line.
Foreign editions are something that Emagine takes in its stride. Multiple editions can be set up from the base version, enabling translators and foreign production staff to plug into the system with the same ease as the original users. Flatplans can be moved around at will, new ads booked in and old ones taken out – and of course, all foreign editions benefit from the same versatile proofing options as the base publication.
Flexibility is the key to the entire system, especially when it comes to workflow solutions. At Rhapsody, we’ve always been aware that each and every publication has its own unique set of requirements, and that asset management systems should be for the user to manage – not the other way round. Emagine was built from the ground up to be adaptable to almost any workflow imaginable with current technology, and our technical team takes great pride in being able to adapt the system to meet clients’ specific requirements.
Like all good software, Emagine is also designed to keep pace with changes in hardware development. More innovations are already in the pipeline and the next major upgrade will feature touch-screen technology. So why not have a word with our technical team today and see how they can help your work flow – now and in the future.
