Adobe Encore DVD 1.0 - my impressions

[Skynet107]

I've had a chance to use Adobe DVD Encore 1.0 at work to author a DVD and observed a few things. Firstly, by far the best aspect of Encore is that it used Adobe Photoshop images directly for the menus. This makes it very very powerful and easy to make fantastic looking graphical menus and import them right into Encore. If you use the layer naming standard put forth by Encore you get the button states and alpha transparency intact from your photoshop image. You give each layer a specific name and Encore uses the layer name for the attributes of buttons, including the normal state, mouse over state and activated state.

The program itself is really very simple, but the interface is not geared to lower desktop resolutions. 1024x768 is way too low to be useful, 1280x960 is the minimum that I would use for this program. The interface is simple and familiar to anyone that has used other Adobe apps, which is okay but can be aggrevating as well. Some functions and options are hard to find and not obvious even after reading the help file. For example, to get an audio track into a menu you have to drag an icon from the properties window over to your assets window, not the other way around. But to add a movie to your timeline you drag the movie from the assets window to the timeline, completely backwards to adding audio to a menu. Silly. Moving around buttons that I created in Photoshop was very easy, just drag them around, even re-size them.

Motion menus are also possible in Encore, but there is not enough control over the process for my liking. To enable motion menus you check off the motion menu option in the menu properties page. You also set the duration, the loop point and you can add audio as well. It is also possible to change the starting point of the motion for each thumbnail, this is useful if the start of the video in that particular button/thumbnail happens to be a black part of the movie. I authored 3 pages of motion buttons pretty quickly. The nice thing is that you have total control over the look/feel/placement of everything because like I stated everything I did I created in Photoshop. You don't HAVE to use Photoshop for the menus, Encore comes with some graphics and backgrounds that you can drag/drop onto your menus. The buttons are pre-made with the correct layers for motion and the button states.

By far the worst part of Encore is the speed. The program is just plain slow. The system I used is a screaming beast but Encore still lagged. I wanted to see how my motion menus were going to look so I used the render option and it took what seemed like forever. What I did not like is in the process of the preview render the app was totally non-responsive most of the time. No progress bar (there is one but it only updates sometimes) and no way to mimimize the program. The worst problem I ran into is I had to exit the program so of course I saved my project. When I re-opened it, everything opening fast and I was ready to resume. But when I went to open the timeline (most things are not visible when you re-open the project, the menus and timeline are not show you have to open them yourself) the program thrashed the hard drive for at least 10 minutes, while the program was totally non-responsive. I can only guess that Encore was re-examing the mpeg2 video file to verify it, but I am not sure. Why it insisted on this stupid behaivour is beyond me.

Encore seems to be able to accept pretty much any type of audio and video file. You don't have to encode anything to DVD standards before importing. Everything you import can be transcoded when you compile the DVD. I did not use this feature I imported DVD compliant assets into Encore. I cannot state the the quality or speed of the encoding/transcoding process, but it stands to reason that having to transcode all your video and audio will add many hours to the compile time. It can be useful for audio though, you don't have to worry about taking an mp3 or wave file and encoding it to mp2, AC3 or DTS etc. you can let Encore worry about this. For audio the transcoding is nice, for video I doubt it is viable but like I said I did not test this aspect.

Overall I like the app and was very pleased with the results. But the speed of the program sucked. If I had to use it everyday it would be aggrevating because you can't really do anything else on the system when it is doing it's thing, and at times the program is non-responsive as it beats the hell out of the hard drive. It is capable of very polished, professional looking results but at the cost of hair-pulling and general aggrevation. If you want to author the best possible DVD then it is worth a go, but for casual projects, forget it. DVD-Lab is the best for this by far from what I have used. And of course don't forget the price. It is $500.00+, way out of my price range. IMHO the program needs work and polish and for the price should have been better.

[freestyler]

No DTS in Encore, only Dolby Digital from what I've read.

Motion menus are also possible in Encore, but there is not enough control over the process for my liking

What software do you prefer most for making motion menus?

Is there a trial version of this? How were you able to review it?