File is Absurdly huge. Not sure how to handle it.

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
December 2, 2018
3 replies
574 views

Not really sure where to begin. I've been working on a mural at my job for 7 months now almost everyday on my off time. Started in PS, got very far decided I had to convert to Illustrator. (I've been learning everything along the way). Draw everything, and color it in Adobe Animate. Export SVP to illustrator. Well now I've finished the whole thing and it's intended to be 9 feet wide by 4 feet tall. After learning about blending methods/ transparency I went crazy and wanted to add atmospheric perspective to the piece and every character (over 100 in space shooting lasers etc.) have like 3 blending layers on top of them.

I've made a custom cutout for behind it so I can control the light that comes through, and don't want to sacrifice any quality at all but still need to print this at 300 dpi.

There are so many layers (over 500 with transparency blending methods) that I didn't think this would be a problem. Is there a way to mass flatten everything or id there Is there anything else suggested I do to make this exported pdf manageable?

I'm at the finish line but just didn't think I'd run into this.

This topic has been closed for replies.

T

twoscoops121Author

Participant

This is exactly what I'm worried about, and simply just don't know enough about what to do there. Learning so much but new to the printing side. I'm really not sure how the hell to save it optimized, or what I should do. The illustrator file by itself is 251,000 KB and it doesn't have any images it's mostly all vector so that's got to be in my favor BUT over 700 layers and can't even count the paths etc so... When I save it with the settings in the screenshots below I get around 90,000 KB. A friend told me they print things that are over 1GB, and I shouldn't be concerned, however I don't have a means to get it printed at the moment, and my print lady said the file was too big at 65,000 KB. Not sure if her equipment is the problem or what. Just trying to get a solid answer here to have it the best quality I can get. I don't want to flatten the transparency or play with all the blending modes to save it since that's part of why it looks great. This thing means the world to me, and I've got people interested in it online, so hoping to figure it out.

Thanks so much in advance.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

So you've got a lot of paths and you've used transparency options such as blending modes? effects?

Chances are that there are raster effects in it which means some of it gets rasterized. Or maybe even a lot of it.

What exactly are you printing? And which printing process?

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

Are you SURE you want it at 300 ppi? This is a rule of thumb for printing small pieces, but it goes out of the window for big pieces - for obvious reasons, files are just too big for anyone! So, have you based this 300 ppi figure on a detailed analysis of your project and full discussion with the printer? Or are you just carrying the 300 ppi figure in because it seems good practice or someone once recommended it? If in doubt, please tell us the type of printing you plan, and exactly how close the audience will be to the mural. The more you can tell us about the mechanics of this, the better we can give advice.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Just about what file size are we talking?

How will you get it to the printer?

Ray Yorkshire

Participating Frequently

on the save adobe pdf, uncheck

Pieserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities

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