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Jay Fishman, veteran digitizer and owner of Ohio-based Wicked Stitch of the East,
talks about common digitizing mistakes, the real value of automated punching tools
and dealing with overseas competition. |
True digitizing is manual, not soft- ware-based. Learn to digitize; don't just rely on automated tools in digitizing software. Everyone uses software now. It used to cost $15,000 to buy a digitizing software package, and now it's down to $1,500, so the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. True digitizers think in terms of manual digitizing. Too many punchers today rely on auto- digitizing with presets. While software has become super automatic, it's not foolproof -- you need to understand how it auto-operates so that you can correct designs when needed.
Software has a lot of answers, but it's not always correct. In the time it takes to edit what was automaticaly digitized, you could have digitized it yourself twice. Automation has come a long way, but you're either going to spend your time digitizing or editing. Great digitizers turn the auto-functions off and don't let software make decisions for them. If you're classically trained, you know what you have to do and you do it. In my shop, we do a lot of work for dog agility events and horse shows. If the animals' faces aren't digitized just right, the customer sees it immediately. Software can do a lot of things, but it'll never replace the human eye.
Digitizers should provide post-sale support. People think good digitizers are a dime a dozen. They're not. Right now, there are growth opportunities in supporting our decorator customers
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"At the end of the day, cutomers will
figure out the difference between good
and bad digitizing, so wherever it comes
from, if the quality is poor, they'll go
somewhere else."
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Stitches Magazine June 2014