Customer Reviews

Adobe Encore DVD 2.0 [Old Version]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've been using Encore since its first release. I don't know why many people complain about bugs and files corrupted. I've never had any problems in 3 years using this software. This is no Windows movie maker or iDVD. This is a serious prefessional software. If you want to learn it you should be comitted to research book like Adobe's Classroom in a Book or any other kind of tutorial book. I use this software at a professional level. I send DVD masters for mass reproduction every month and Encore has never failed me. I just upgraded to HDV and it handles it well too. I used to use Ulead DVD and as soon as I got Encore my whole production changed. I start my film in Premiere, tweak it in After Effects and DVD authoring in Encore and done, ready for reproduction.

It is astonishing to me that Adobe ships Encore 2.0 with some of the bizarre bugs it has. For example, if you adjust the font height in a menu by dragging the bounding rectangle, that resize is NOT reflected in the font properties, so you have no way to measure or tweak what you have done. As a software developer, I find this behavior very unsettling. I frequently have trouble reading in my modified DVD presets. And would someone please explain why the timeline editing is so freaking clumsy?

Encore's UI is typical Adobe, powerful, unnecessarily obtuse, almost designed to make you feel pain, perhaps as a way to haze you and build some type of power user brand loyalty? Speaking of that, don't forget that Adobe tries to get you to buy their entire suite of stuff by removing features that should be here and putting them in other adobe products.

If you want to have disgruntled employees treat you badly, just mess up your activation and call Adobe's activation line where you can be treated like a software pirate running a warez shop. Hopefully your experience will be better. I think phone support must be one of the more draining and psychologically wearing jobs out there.

But don't get me wrong, there are many great features in this package. The workflow-style visualization is very helpful. I just wish they took all that money and all those programmers and spent a little bit of time on some serious QA and finish work, considering how many people are using this product!

Unfortunately, it's a tough call when buying DVD authoring software. Sonic's product and customer support may actually be worse than Adobe's. I need to play around with Sony's DVD Architect and see how it compares.

DON'T BUY! This piece of software is full of bugs and inexplicable system errors. I have never been able to complete any project. Every time, my project gets corrupted for no reason and then need to be rebuilt from scratch. If you don't believe me, please visit the Adobe User Forum and read through all the messages from users crying for help with program and system errors. I own the whole Production Studio Suite but I ended up buying DVDit in addition.