Our project will start by defining the terminology that we will use and introducing some of the issues surrounding production workflows, providing a proper framework for further discussion. We will then compare various approaches in the market, charting their workflows and explaining their approaches. Our goal is to end up with a set of test files for use in making comparisons. To evaluate the products in the market, we have defined three scenarios and asked the vendors of workflow systems to illustrate how their products would handle those job situations. This is the simplest case.
Electronic files are in a variety of formats, and part of the job comes in as film.
The workflow requires a correction cycle. Our objective is for these sample jobs to enable comparisons between products, basing our discussion on the common terminology that we shall define for a frame of reference. We hope that readers will be able to use the information we provide, perhaps with some modifications, to see how their own requirements would fare using the various alternatives on the market. With that in mind, we suggest that a good way to analyze a specific workflow is to begin by laying out the steps either graphically or in a columnar format. The more complicated the workflow, the more likely it is that a graphical representation will be the easiest to lay out and understand.