Indie Music Minute: How CD Digipaks are printed at Disc Makers

Hi, I’m Tony van Veen, CEO Disc Makers.
Today I’m going to show you how digipaks are made. Digipaks are one of the
most popular packaging formats, and Disc Makers in my opinion makes the best digipaks on the planet. This is a sample you know what digipaks are. It’s a board
product, we use recycled board, it has a plastic tray that glues in and then the
disc is inserted into the tray. That makes a beautiful finished product. So
Disc Makers, to my knowledge, is the only manufacturer in the country that
actually does the printing and manufacturing of digipaks and also
does the manufacturing of the disc, so let’s take a quick look at how digipaks are made. It starts on the printing press so let’s go. So this is our Komori press if you can see here there’s a printing plate. We take printing plates in four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black; so blue, red, yellow, black. And those four colors are layered on top of each other
to provide this full-color look. So we can see yellow, magenta, cyan, and black. The white sheets are fed through the printing press if you show here you can see them rolling through. There are rollers that apply the ink to the sheets So as we go through the press it gradually goes from a one to a two to a three to a full color job. And finished sheets come off the press. And so what what you get then is a sheet, and you officially use the sheets to print multiple projects on the same sheet So once the sheet is printed, we apply a
UV coating so we’re gonna walk over there right now, so come with me. Okay so here we are at
the Tracy UV coater. We put two kinds of coating on, either a high gloss or a
matte finish. And so this is an uncoated sheet. The uncoated sheet goes into the machine and then as it goes through
machine there is a drum that applies the high gloss UV coating at the end. And so if you look at the end, we have sheets
that are beautifully glossy. We also have sample here for a project that has a
matte coating; and the matte coating is, if you come in closer, is a really nice kind
of premium look that a lot of our clients prefer. There’s no extra charge
we’re the only printer I think that the UV and matte coating at no extra charge.
So after we have our coating on we have to cut the sheet to get the Digipaks
assembled. This is our KAMA die cutter. So we start with the sheets, which are all staged
here, and then there’s a die that cuts each sheet. I’ll show you the die. This is a die. These are all blades that cut the
paper. So as the paper is fed through through the die cuts the sheet at the die. So if you come up here, you can see it. So those sheets are all cut already. The
content just has to be stripped out which is done over here. Okay so you saw the die cutting, and here on the sheets if you come a little closer, You can see on the sheet, it’s been cut This is a digipak. tray will get
glued in here and eventually it’ll be a beautiful digipak. So we have stack of
sheets; our man Brian here will hammer them and he will basically rip them out and
they’ll go over to a folder gluer which is the last part of the printing and
finishing process. All right so when we have our die cut sheets we need to fold and glue them. That’s done over here on the BOBST folder gluer. Sheets are loaded in, fed through, glue is sprayed onto the board, they’re folded, and they go through the pressure tunnel
to make sure that the glue adheres. Thank you, sir. And then we end up with a beautifully
folded and glued to digipak. The next step is applying the tray and we’re
going to do that in our packaging department where the disc is also
inserted and it’s polywrapped. Let’s go! We’re in our packaging department, it’s little loud in here. This is the last step
of the digipak assembly process. We’re going to basically take the board
product that you just saw printed, we’re going to glue in the tray, we’re going to stick in the disc, and then it’s going to feed right into the shrink wrapping
machine for a finished digipak; so let’s take a look at how that’s done. The board product is
loaded into the GIMA machine, it’s called a GIMA. Come see how it’s done here. It folds one copy at a time and if you come around the machine we can see that the trays
glued in, go a little closer. The tray is glued in over there, and then the disc is dropped into the tray digipak is closed automatically by the machine, and then
it feeds right into the shrink wrap. Shrink wrap Discs come out, and they’re
inserted into the carton. And there we go, high-quality finished
digipaks done at Disc Makers faster than anywhere else, just for you. See you next time!

Written by Brian Rohrer

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