Covers

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Covers

Amtech, who did my DVD pressing in Canada (www.amtechdisc.com ) was kind enough to provide CD Quark cover and label templates for our CD. (The DVD label should work for CD.)

There is an excellent tutorial on page layout, pre-press, and making things print ready on their site at:

www.amtechdisc.com/printspecs/cd-label-film-spec.htm.

I also highly recommend them for all your CD, CD-Extra, and DVD pressing needs. They're great folks, reasonably priced, attentive, and do good work. Tell George I sent ya.

They are in Canada, so if you're not there, you will have to pay shipping, but they are cheaper than most places in the States. And you may save with a few other aspects of the whole job overall from going down the street.

With print (covers, flyers, and such), always use high-rez (high-resolution: between 150 and 300 dpi, or dots per inch) images. Printing low-rez (Web-rez 72 dpi) looks crappy. And I'm seeing a lot more of this, as bands and clubs just take images from Web sites, including their own. In the old days, we cut and pasted (with scissors and real paste!) from magazines. All high rez.

Look in the Goodies folder on the CD for examples. One is called high-rez-example.jpg, and one is called low-rez-example.jpg. The high rez one's file size is 970K; the low-rez is about 65K. They are both 72 dpi, but the high-rez one is huge (2048 x 1536 pixels), so the relative resolution is way higher than the low-rez one (600 x 450 pixels).

Conversely, use low-rez on the Web. High-rez images have higher file sizes and take longer to download. I am seeing a lot of goofballs who don't understand this and just use the resize function in the HTML to make an image look smaller (and scrunched). Idiots. It still takes as long to download! I've seen single pages with two megs of images. A page should have less than 100K of images and HTML most of the time. The exception is giving a clickable link to a high-rez version of an image marked "high-rez version to download and use for print." Go to www.30dollarfilmschool.com and click on the link, Bio, press release, and high-rez photos of author and cover, for a good example of how to do this.

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