How is Thrive?

[rfulford]

The flatbed we purchased years ago came with ColorGate Production server which I really like. We need to upgrade a few old Onyx rips in the shop and I was hoping to unify on ColorGate but the complete package price from Fuji is over $20,000. How different is Thrive from PosterShop/Production House? How do you like it in comparison to other Rips you have used? There is not a lot of feedback out there from Thrive users. I have found neither laudatory or disparaging comments comments about this Rip. I want the good and the bad and most of all, I want real user feadback.

 

[FrankW]

The look and feel of Thrive is 99.9% the same as of Productionhouse. If you know how to use Productionhouse, you know how to use Thrive. The Design of the title bar is a little bit different (Thrive-Logo).

Main differences:

• Adobe APPE RIP Engine
• More enhanced Webinterface
• Network Licence: Thrive can be opened on every computer in the network, independently were the dongle is connected. More than one RIP-Computer can be driven by one dongle, more than one Onyx Production Manager (looks like the standard RIP-Queue application) at a time can be installed and driven, only limited by number of licenced RIP-Engines, active Printers etc.

No Surprises for Onyx users (except very old versions), even profiles can be interchanged. You can replace multiple old Onyx-Products with one Thrive-Licence with the according number of printers and RIP's. And, for the security, you can get a backup dongle (time-limited up to 30 days, same setups than the original dongle) to keep your printshop running if the dongle crashes.

The software versions are the same in Productionhouse an Thrive, sometimes the same problems appear (I have a few PDF's out of office software wo let crash both Thrive and Productionhouse). There are three base packs which can be modular expanded.

My personal opinion: nice idea to share the licence over multiple computers, but all I don't like on Onyx Productionhouse is still there (as the things I like).

 

[Hotspur]

Yes that's right Thrive is just the networked version of Onyx that runs an Adobe rip rather than a Jaws rip so if you like Onyx you'll like Thrive and vice-versa as they look and operate the same.

One thing I would say is that the Adobe rip has the Adobe Normalizer that you wont find elsewhere - its a bit like distiller where other postscript file types are turned into PDFs and put through the same PDF workflow to give the same results - other rips using Adobe only rip PDFs whilst PS and EPS go through some other engine & you can't rely on the colors being similar so yes its a big plus imho.

Also the networked idea is a good one - you buy the number of rip engines you need and spread them around whatever PCs you want - each rip utilises a single core of your PC so you can spread the work to wherever you need or you can get one big PC and run them all on that - I have a dual quad core PC so thats 8 cores and have 8 Adobe rips on my dongle - each rip engine uses one core so I can process 8 jobs simultaneously without the PC slowing down - pretty sure you wont find that anywhere else either so there are some big pluses for Thrive.