Variable Data Printing Using EFI Fiery RIP, Save Time and Money in Your Print Shop

A great feature integrated into EFI Fiery RIP that is connected to your Konica Minolta, Xerox, Ricoh Digital Press. I'll be using this in the future. I previously achieved VDP by using PDF snake. Or by running projects back through the press multiple times. I'm actually could have printed and collated this with the variable data on my c1070. Which I might do next time. Looking forward to the next time I can use it.

[Benzelf]

What a lovely little helper you have Dan :-)

[wadebaxter]

Thx for the demo dan ! I’ve been manually duplexing when doing VDP - didn’t realize the free form option would allow auto duplexing !!! Thx so much !

[pozo]

Sir, you have just changed my life. I’ve beeen running the job through twice! Once to print the job and then again for the addresses! I’ve been doing this for YEARS! I’m embarrassed 😳 THANK YOU!

[paulng]

I remember myself when i was young just like your baby girl. I was so amazed with the typewriter my grandfather had in his printshop and how it made the letters print on paper. I am now a 3rd gen printer and i’m loving it. To cut the long story short, the rest was history. Lets pass on the knowledge so we can take a long break oneday.

[miketheprintman]

You can also use VDP to change entire images or areas of text on pages as well. This allows you to run targeted direct mail campaigns based on user interests, membership levels, etc. I did one where the company had a silver/gold/platinum membership tier so the coupon values changed. Ran a 1, 500 postcard job like that, it’s pretty awesome.

[aljosaopp]

So good. We also have Efi Fiery, but always using Indesign or Fusion Pro for variable data. Next time I'll try Fiery vdp.
Tnx for all interesting videos.

[nate_riggins_photography]

This video showed up at the right time for me. I’ve been working on merging a 65, 000 double sided page document onto a letterhead template through InDesign. I can’t go past 9999 pages on each so it’s creating a lot of files that take forever to create. We’ve used the VDP feature in Fiery before but couldn’t figure out how to make it work on a two page document. This will save me a ton of time and frustration!

[robertmenlo]

You just saved so much time with this video thanks.

[theronroberts]

I have tried to have our service tech show us this, and even they were not able to figure it out. Thank you!

[PatrickDKing]

I did a few mailing a long time ago. I got lucky and was always able to get an office document version of the file and use mail merge. Some of the really big jobs like thousands pieces I'd take the material to a mailhouse and they could put the addresses on about anything. For me at the time it made sense to outsource that part but it worked out nicely.

[RobbieDigglersrdEye]

Super cool! I do all my mail merges in InDesign and export to PDF in the data merge pallet.

[LatitudeSky]

For small runs, or when you don't have a RIP to do it, you can build a master document in Word and link it to an Excel file with the variable data. Then print to printer or PDF to produce the merged output. This approach is useful when the run is a one-off and too small for a programmed job using Exstream or DocuMaker or whatever else is the flavor of the moment. The place where I work does it with in-house software feeding multiple print plants outputting about a million printed images a day, all variable. It's not a huge operation except compared to smaller shops. We're dwarfed by the likes of RRD.

[BrehonTL]

Discovered this myself under similar circumstances. Lead me to look into what else it can do, found EFI Freeform, which gas "some" uses, and of course Indesign which works very well, but you need lots of graphic, processor and Ram memory.

[saiphoshan]

Hi Dan, I love to watch yr video :) . .

[robertscottphotography]

We use Fiery FreeForm Create (I think it's called that), it's a free download in the Fiery software manager. You just load your CSV and master pdf into that and it makes a VDP document for you

[Shajirr_]

If you have InDesign, it has a Data Merge feature which allows to use variable data, and so you can have as many pages as you want in a copy, so making double-sided layout is not a problem. It supports raster image/vector files as variable data too.
Of course as others mentioned if you need like 50000 different copies, placing background on each would probably take Fiery like half a day to process, so better to separate the master and use the method from this video.

[kabirpaul]

I’ve been doing it manually in InDesign and creating those large files with 1000+ pages😭 I shall try this for the next batch of mailings.

[keithshapiro]

I've got a C4080 and a Fiery IC-317 and the command workstation always says 100% toner, until one is empty then I get an indication on the copier. Does your software show current levels? The screen shot shows 100% on yours too. I'm just curious. Great video by the way

[mrwonk]

Looking at your tab machine, it looks like you could almost stick another roller assembly on the bottom half and have it run both tabs at the same time.

[philanderson]

Dan I’ve been using Accuzip for my mailing software. Curious what you are using? I have a Accufast K2 tabber. Double tabs in a single pass. Not a bad tabber.