Tips & Insights

Top 3 reasons why PrimeCenter is the best choice to prepare your print & cut jobs

March 05, 2025

Picking PrimeCenter for your nesting and job preparation is a no brainer— here are 3 reasons why

If you don’t think you need Caldera’s prepress software PrimeCenter, you probably haven’t realized exactly how much it can do. Because usually, once people learn of its capabilities, we find we’re preaching to the converted. Read on and discover how you could transform your workflow, save time and improve your bottom line.

💡 What is PrimeCenter?

Basically, PrimeCenter is a nesting software that has been developed to simplify the preparation of print & cut files, while reducing the errors that lead to media wastage and harnessing the power of automation to increase productivity. The program sits upstream of your RIP and can be tasked with checking, correcting, sorting, grouping and preparing your files for production. It ensures higher quality and better consistency across all of your output, making production faster and smoother, and saving valuable operator time across repetitive tasks.

Top 3 reasons to choose PrimeCenter

In our opinion, there are three big wins when you choose PrimeCenter:

1) PrimeCenter works with virtually every RIP

Whatever RIP you’re using, as long as it’s PDF compliant, you’ll be able to use PrimeCenter. And it’s no hassle to get started as you won’t need to change your current set-up and color management organization.

Once in position, upstream of your RIP, it will send optimally prepared jobs to whichever RIP you’re using. You just import the files into PrimeCenter, create your own recipes for media parameters, preflight checks, print bleed, cut marks, annotations, nesting and output options. And all at once your prepress is automated!

Ready-to-print and cut PDF files can be exported to your choice of RIP software and cutting systems.

2) PrimeCenter delivers optimized nesting in seconds

PrimeCenter gives you the most powerful true-shape nesting on the market. Instead of manually nesting your files in your design software, you can let PrimeCenter do it for you instantly. Not only is it far faster, you’ll also get optimal layouts which add up to big media savings. The smart nesting engine allows you to nest multiple copies of the same file, different files of a similar format or numerous images of varying sizes and dimensions.

PrimeCenter users are able to cut media wastage by up to 20% using its advanced true-shape nesting algorithm. The knock on to the media budget can be significant.

3) PrimeCenter automates file preparation

For a busy printshop, being able to efficiently streamline prepress operations represents an important saving in time and money. With PrimeCenter, you’ll be able to set up recipes for your most repetitive tasks. Using these pre-designed instructions, the system automatically prepares files for print. This saves your operators the time they once spent manually configuring each individual file.

The result can be a threefold acceleration in your file preparation. Once you’ve built up a library of custom recipes—by client, job, or media type—your workflow undergoes a complete transformation.

How MK Signs transformed their workflow with PrimeCenter

MK Signs adopted PrimeCenter to run its Summa cutter operations. According to the company owner Mike Kasold, “PrimeCenter has been a game changer for us. Instead of setting up all these files by manually nesting everything onto a four-by-eight artboard, and manually adding registration marks, we don’t have to do that. We started with PrimeCenter about a week after we got our Summa cutter, and together they’ve made a huge difference. We immediately realized that if we were going to make this cutter efficient, we would need a way to get the files to it automatically, rather than having to set everything up manually. PrimeCenter lets me import everything into a hot folder and press a button.” Read their full story on our blog.

One of the main benefits of PrimeCenter is that it saves a significant amount of time by eliminating the need to perform repetitive tasks manually. Operatives can save 30% of their time, freeing them up for alternative value-added tasks and reducing bottlenecks in the workflow. The resulting reduction in human error is another factor that gives PrimeCenter users the edge. You’ll be able to perform preflight checks to automatically correct common issues in your files before production, so no more costly reprints.

Mike Kasold told us about the amount of time he saves. “Using PrimeCenter saves me, depending on the workload, anything from 20 minutes to two or three hours, by not having to set things up manually. Even while it’s processing the information, I can get on with another task or help somebody else in the shop. Then I come back and it transfers everything into the RIP and straight to the printer.”