For retail-ready manufacturing orders (CD/DVD/CASSETTE/VINYL/BLU-RAY) new customers are required to place a 75% deposit on all orders. If you prefer, you may prepay for your entire order. The remainder of your balance shall be due prior to either shipment from our plant facilities or prior to pickup from our Corporate offices. For bulk disc orders and orders for printed packaging only, we request prepayment in full
Most studio sessions require a deposit payment to hold, and then full payment of the session invoice to maintain the session. For sessions under 8 hours, payment in full is generally requested. Your studio rep or our billing manager will advise you how this policy affects your session. Any balances owed for overtime shall be due prior to mixes being provided.
We give you a refund for any money that you have been charged that we haven’t produced that service for as of the time that you cancel. In the industry the technical description of this policy is “all unused monies will be returned.” Please note that any services and items that may have been completed, including design or prepress work, art file or audio/video master review, film output and/or direct-to-plate processing, as well as any transfer fees normally included in the cost of the item(s) purchased), will incur a charge that will be deducted from the amount of the refund.
Our official policy states that if there is a mechanical defect with your discs or printing, or if your printing is not “acceptable to within industry standards”, then we will promptly replace it. While custom manufactured items are not refundable for a cash refund, if there is anything wrong with your replicated and printed product, we will take the steps to fix it. Note that this does not included things that might have gone wrong on your end before you sent us the elements for duplication, so please be careful when you are preparing your masters and artwork. Due to the nature and various limitations of offset, silkscreen, and digital printing on disc surfaces and other media, the results of some printing may not be exactly as expected or intended. To ensure there will not be any surprises, we recommend the purchase of a calibrated hard copy proof, as well as offer a variety of audio/video proofs. Please email your rep at the time you submit your materials to request additional proofs.
Orders under 300 units (depending on the booklet/folder size & type) are sometimes printed using a different type of printer from our usual offset printing process (inserts, tray cards, j-cards, dvd enclosures/wraps, cardboard wallets, sleeves, vinyl jackets, etc.), and different from our usual media surface printing method (typically offset or silkscreen printing for full color CMYK images, and silkscreen printing for spot color designs). When we print lower quantities using Laser printing, we do not create a “plate” or use films. Instead, we print directly from your art files, which saves some money in setup costs. The resolution of inserts printed using these alternate methods is sometimes lower than that of our offset printing, which difference tends to create a somewhat different final look. We find that our quality on short run projects is very satisfactory for most of our customers, but please advise us if you have specific needs or concerns.
On most all of our print jobs for inserts, tray cards, j-cards, dvd enclosures/wraps, cardboard wallets, sleeves, vinyl jackets, etc., we use what is called CMYK mode for printing. Regardless of the program you are using to create your artwork, you will need to set the files to use CMYK color mode. This is easy to do with most professional design programs, as well as with layout programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign, QuarkXpress, and we recommend you take this step yourself so that you can see what your design will look like in CMYK mode. Some other programs which are primarily designed for web applications will not allow you to set your color mode to CMYK. Often our design/prepress staff can make this change for you, but the colors shown in the final output of your inserts will vary somewhat from that which you either saw or printed using your original application.
When we do the silkscreen printing for the surface of your CDs, there are several significant differences in the printing method that are important to be aware of. They are as follows: 1) because the surface of an unprinted compact disc is reflective silver, colors printed directly on this surface will look different from images that are printed directly on a white surface. To compensate for this difference, we generally print a white base (normally referred to as a white flood) before printing the image on the disc. 2) in silkscreen printing, solid colors image better than colors which are built using a color separation process, so many designers choose to create art which utilizes more basic design concepts that make use of more solid colors than separated colors. To allow for these two basic preferences, we use two different printing modes for on-disc printing. The first is called spot color printing, and we use an internationally standardized color system called the Pantone Matching System (AKA "PMS Color" printing). The other type of printing that we do is for full-color disc designs (CMYK offset or silkscreen printing). By default, we print a white flood coat before we print the CMYK image on the disc, to help the colors achieve a reasonably good match for any similar images that are being used on accompanying inserts. We normally refer to this five color printing process as CMYK+White printing. In order to set up the image for on your disc surface, you will need to set the color mode to whichever of the above printing methods you wish to use (CMYK or PMS). While it is relatively easy to set your design work and monochromatic images to CMYK in most any design program (or convert any color pictures from RGB mode to CMYK mode if necessary), it is somewhat more difficult to convert from RGB to Pantone colors with most photo manipulation programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, or Illustrator. If, on the other hand, you are trying to turn a full color image into a duotone or tritone or monotone, you will first need to make these conversions in a program such as Adobe Photoshop or inDesign, and then place them into one of the other programs above.