VeeDeePee: get up close and personal with variable-data publishing (vdp)

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XMPie at drupa

Housed off to one side of the Xerox stand, XMPie has a handful of technologies and products on show in their contained booth.

One new technology making its drupa debut is XMPie's new "gossiping cluster technology", which, despite the unusual name doesn't have much to do with talking. It's a technology used to refer to the ability to split a single print job across multiple uProduce servers (and InDesign Servers), processing each file individually on the server cluster, then stitch it together at the end as a single print-ready file, all transparent to the end user.

Also on show was XMPie's ability to support for Xerox speciality imaging. At the moment, support limited to flourescent text and microtext, but will be expanded to include other specialty imaging features in the near future. It's tightly integrated into uDirect and we can expect to see this integration available in the next major release.

Flourescent text sample (strip on right-hand side)

XMPie also featured a 20 minute cinema-style where attendees could register and see their names featured in a personalised movie-style presentation. The movie was somewhat cheesy, but it showed how easy it is to animate Flash content and add personalisation.

XMPie's press release yesterday noted "uImage's ability to leverage the video functionalities of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended", so I was anticipating that XMPie would show examples of this on their stand. However, this was nowhere to be seen which was disappointing, as their early demonstration at XMPie Users Group Conference in February showed an exciting techology with promising results.

At drupa 2008, XMPie demonstrated that they are continuing to push the VDP boundary, although I'd really like to have seen them push it a little bit further. Maybe my expectations are too high.

Posted on Friday, 30 May 2008 at 12:05 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/139