Silhouette Studio® Business Edition provides different viewing choices to let us view both the original Design View and a Media Layout View.

Design View is basically “what you see is what you get,” and you can stick with that traditional view in all versions of Silhouette Studio®. However, when using the Business Edition of the software, there is an additional option to change to the Media Layout View in order to maximize the efficiency of laying out your designs for cutting. When running the Business Edition of Silhouette Studio®, you can find this side-by-side Media Layout View in the bottom panel called Media Layout Setup Panel (click the popout arrow to find it on small screens). Right now, we see the Design View where objects cut out as they’ve been placed in their original design.

Now check the box for “Show Media Layout Split Screen.” Minimize the panel so it’s out of the way. You can see a side-by-side view of your original layout (Design View), and a view of the way your job will be processed to cut your media, like vinyl or paper (that’s the Media Layout View). The goal here is maximum media efficiency and convenience of laying out the job for optimal cutting.

When running in the Media Layout View, you can adjust both the page size of your original Design View in order to have your layout reflect how you want your final project to appear, and can also adjust the media size of the actual material being cut as shown in the Media Layout View. Let’s say we want to put a vinyl quote on a 16-inch-by-20-inch piece of wood. Open a quote and change the Page Size in the normal Page Setup panel to 16 inches wide and 20 inches high. Center this quote on the page.

Now that’s not going to fit on my mat, but it doesn’t matter in Media Layout View. Watch how we can change the size of the material to be cut here in the first tab of the Media Layout Setup Panel. We’ve got vinyl that’s 12” wide and 12” long, so we’ll input that and give it a small cut border so it doesn’t cut all the way to the edge.

Now we can even go back and resize the design larger in my Design View because we can see how much room we’ve got on the Media Layout View side. The media view side basically acts as a cut preview.

The Media Layout Setup works in combination with other Business Edition features, like Matrix Copy options, Media Layout Nesting, and Tiling, and we’ll go over those in other tutorials.

We hope you can see how this Business Edition feature can help maximize your efficiency with layouts and media to be cut.