Adobe Encore DVD

Rating:
Summary: very flexible; poorly written help; somewhat buggy
Review: Adobe Encore DVD might well be the most flexible DVD authoring software in its price range. It allows you to do about anything allowed by the DVD standards - menus of any complexity, subtitles, multiple language sound tracks, you can make menu references to individual chapters, add clips which will play before the main menu, you can determine what will happen at the end of each clip, etc. It has a built-in MPEG encoder which can be configured either manually, or you can instruct it to calculate how mich room you have left on DVD and choose the encoder settings automatically to make sure that everything fits on the disk. Since it uses Photoshop files for menus, the user can take advantage of all that Photoshop is capable of to make the manus visually attractive.

And yes, Encore does only DVD authoring, i.e., it can encode your AVI files in MPEG (if necessary), create menus and links to individual video/audio tracks, and burn this all on DVD. It is not a program for editing videos; for this, Adobe has Permiere Pro.

I tried demo versions of several other products. My first impression was not in Encore's favor - Sony DVD architect, Sonic MyDVD, etc. all allow the user to put together a simple menu within a few minutes using a wizard, whereas in Encore I could do NOTHING before I got and read a book on it (poorly written help files are of little use). However, once I understood several key concepts, I discovered how endless are the possibility to make menus in Encore as compared to other similar programs. As a matter of fact, after all those trials I could not think about any other consumer-grade product which gets anywhere close to Encore in terms of its capabilities.

Adobe offeres a fully functional demo version of this product on its web site, which expires after 30 days. Downloading this demo might be a good starting point if you shop for a program for DVD authoring. Do not miss this opportunity to find out what you can do with it and to verify its compativility with your DVD recorder. However, you should simultaneously either buy a book on Encore or find tutorial movies on the web to be able to use the program. Although Adobe tried to make Encore very easy to use, and it certainly is once you understood how it works, but at first glance the meaning of some palettes and menu items is less than obvious and may even be totally confusing. Help file included with Encore is of little help. There is no wizard to help you get quick results, and attempts to get anything working without understanding of Encore's logic can only lead to frustration. However, once you grasp the picture of how it works and how to link clips and menus, everything becomes simple and clear. While all Adobe products require some time to learn due to their complexity and miriads of possibilities available to the user, one could certainly - at least - provide better explanations in the help. I hope Adobe will address this issue in the future releases. Retail (but not demo) version comes with a nice tutorial on a disk; additionally there is a tutorial movie on DVD that comes with the Video Collection.

It may be somewhat disadvatageous, for some users, that Encore heavily relies on integration with other Adobe products. Encore's own image/text editing capabilities are rather weak, and the users who do not have access to Photoshop would feel lack of means to make their own nice-looking menus within Encore (unfortunately, the number of standard templates in the standard installation of Encore is quite limited).

The only real problem with Encore is that it is unusually buggy for Adobe, which usually takes great effort to carefully test the software before its release. This is the primary reason why I rated this software four stars. The first release was known to crash regularly on the encoding/burning stage; Version 1.01 fixed a number of bugs, but even this version has some problems. For instance, I found it hard way, after damaging several blanks, and with the help of the User Forum on Adobe web site, that an antivirus program may interfere with the DVD burning process (nothing on this is the manual!); just the other day I found that I ccould not import an MPEG file encoded in Premiere into Encore and had to encode it again in Encore. Little by little I developed my own ways to avoid problems: I encode all AVI files in MPEG in Encore rather than in Premiere, create a DVD image (folder) on the disk, and only then turn off the antivirus and burn this image on DVD. I hope Adobe will eventually fix the rest of the bugs - in the meantime, the demo version is a good starting point to see how if program works for you.

Pricewise, it does not make sense to buy Encore as an along-standing product. Adobe Video Collection 1.0 offers much better value for nearly the same money as it includes Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition - a full suite to import digital video, edit it, mix the sound files, and burn it all on DVD. A higher priced video Collection 2 (Pro) additionally includes Photoshop and the Pro version of After Effects.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely buggy
Review: I use & love many Adobe products, especially Photoshop. But Encore 1.01 is by far the worst quality Adobe software I've ever seen. I find it almost impossible to finish a project, at some point it will eventually hang opening the project file and my work is lost. Also there are many obvious & "dumb" bugs which are really annoying, problems with transcoding & video import etc. It's as if nobody even tried to build a few DVDs with this before they released it.

To give you an idea, I had a dollar for every time this has hung and I've had to kill it from Task Manager, I'd have paid for the software by now (i.e. hundreds of times).

The nice feature is integration with photoshop, but that is not enough to compensate for the terrible software quality. For a product at this price point it's criminal, and very unlike Adobe.

I completed one project with this and then gave up using it. I'm hoping 1.5 is better quality, I don't care if they add ANY new features I just want them to fix the bugs!

Rating:
Summary: Extremely buggy
Review: I use & love many Adobe products, especially Photoshop. But Encore 1.01 is by far the worst quality Adobe software I've ever seen. I find it almost impossible to finish a project, at some point it will eventually hang opening the project file and my work is lost. Also there are many obvious & "dumb" bugs which are really annoying, problems with transcoding & video import etc. It's as if nobody even tried to build a few DVDs with this before they released it.

To give you an idea, I had a dollar for every time this has hung and I've had to kill it from Task Manager, I'd have paid for the software by now (i.e. hundreds of times).

The nice feature is integration with photoshop, but that is not enough to compensate for the terrible software quality. For a product at this price point it's criminal, and very unlike Adobe.

I completed one project with this and then gave up using it. I'm hoping 1.5 is better quality, I don't care if they add ANY new features I just want them to fix the bugs!

Rating:
Summary: buggy
Review: This is a buggy product.

I tried to create a DVD with menus and subtitles. The menus worked fine. But when I added some subtitles, Encore started to crash with "Out of Memory" error.

When it crashed, not only did it corrupt the current project, it somehow corrupted an earlier saved project as well. Perhaps it was already corrupt but did not manifest itself until later.

I then tried adding subtitles on another computer with more memory (512MB), but it crashed just the same.

I checked the support forum at Adobe and realized that I'm not alone on this issue.

Eventually I resorted to using a freeware to create subtitles and then import them into Encore. But eventually I ran into another error: "disc in inconsistent state" while building the DVD. Fortunately, someone on the Adobe support forum pointed out a workaround.

This review applies to version 1.0.1.

Version 1.5 has just been announced.

Rating:
Summary: buggy
Review: This is a buggy product.

I tried to create a DVD with menus and subtitles. The menus worked fine. But when I added some subtitles, Encore started to crash with "Out of Memory" error.

When it crashed, not only did it corrupt the current project, it somehow corrupted an earlier saved project as well. Perhaps it was already corrupt but did not manifest itself until later.

I then tried adding subtitles on another computer with more memory (512MB), but it crashed just the same.

I checked the support forum at Adobe and realized that I'm not alone on this issue.

Eventually I resorted to using a freeware to create subtitles and then import them into Encore. But eventually I ran into another error: "disc in inconsistent state" while building the DVD. Fortunately, someone on the Adobe support forum pointed out a workaround.

This review applies to version 1.0.1.

Version 1.5 has just been announced.

If the product is not buggy, I would give it 4 stars. Why not 5? Because customizing menus require use of photoshop.

Rating:
Summary: Ouch! Home users beware...
Review: Unfortunately I have to disagree with any positive review of this product. I've been using trial versions of several "prosumer" class DVD authoring packages before deciding on a final buy, and this product stands out as the worst of them all by far.

When used on a Dell dual P4 2.6GHz Xeon workstation with 2GB of RAM (not your average home PC by a long shot!) the product sort of kept up with doing some very simple editing on VOB files imported from a DVD produced by a set-top DVD recorder. However, I found the product difficult to use - if you're not an Adobe afficionado (and I'll admit I'm not), rather stay away. The kicker was trying to dome some simple editing on a new Dell 8300 Dimension desktop (3GHz P4, 512MB RAM, high performance video card) - just forget it! The performance is unbelievably poor. The audio got out of sync by several minutes.

By comparison, Ulead's DVD Workshop 2 works very well on the same computers, and for me had a more functional and intuitive user interface - maybe without some of the more obscure features of Encore, but good enough for what I want to do.

Bottom line: on paper this product seems to offer most of the features missing from the cheap "home video" DVD authoring offerings available today, but you'd better have VERY sophisticated computer hardware and a lot of time to fiddle around with it. For the life of me I cannot figure out who Adobe's real target audience for this piece of software is. Not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Ouch! Home users beware...
Review: Unfortunately I have to disagree with any positive review of this product. I've been using trial versions of several "prosumer" class DVD authoring packages before deciding on a final buy, and this product stands out as the worst of them all by far.

When used on a Dell dual P4 2.6GHz Xeon workstation with 2GB of RAM (not your average home PC by a long shot!) the product sort of kept up with doing some very simple editing on VOB files imported from a DVD produced by a set-top DVD recorder. However, I found the product difficult to use - if you're not an Adobe afficionado (and I'll admit I'm not), rather stay away. The kicker was trying to dome some simple editing on a new Dell 8300 Dimension desktop (3GHz P4, 512MB RAM, high performance video card) - just forget it! The performance is unbelievably poor. The audio got out of sync by several minutes.

By comparison, Ulead's DVD Workshop 2 works very well on the same computers, and for me had a more functional and intuitive user interface - maybe without some of the more obscure features of Encore, but good enough for what I want to do.

Bottom line: on paper this product seems to offer most of the features missing from the cheap "home video" DVD authoring offerings available today, but you'd better have VERY sophisticated computer hardware and a lot of time to fiddle around with it. For the life of me I cannot figure out who Adobe's real target audience for this piece of software is. Not recommended.