Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Adobe, shame on you!, March 28, 2005
How could ever Adobe release such a messy software? The same Adobe that created Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects we've known for their professionalism and reliability! I use Encore ver 1.5.1 and it looks like it can handle only simple projects with menu and bunch of chapters. Working with anything extra e.g. subtitles becomes frustrating and annoying, making projects hardly possible to finish. Expect tons of "Out of memory", "Abnormal condition" and other errors and eventually, corrupted projects and wasted time. Encore does not even seem like written by the same team that makes other Adobe products. Adobe, do something about it! Your reputation is at stake. Well, just to make it easier on them a little bit, competition is even worse in some cases, but still, that does not give Adobe any right to lower their standars. Just take a look on the web and you will find complaints from all over the world. Bottom line: from messed-up workflow through endless errors, Encore sucks!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Encore Compliments Other Adobe Products, December 10, 2005
I was pleased to receive my copy of Adobe Encore DVD. After having experience with some of the other Adobe products like Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, After Effects and Premiere Pro, I wanted to see how it stacked up. I was also very interested in the level of integration between the other products and Encore.
With products from other companies, combining the power and capabilities of Photoshop CS and other Adobe products with their products provided to be a hassle some of the time, especially since their programs couldn't read PSD format or maintain the layers. I was looking forward to the smooth integration of Photoshop CS, video and audio files. I was not disappointed.
I was able to easily bring in my files from Photoshop CS. What's more, I was able to maintain the layers too! In many other programs, I've had to flatten my Photoshop CS files and convert them to another format. This was OK, but once the file got into the other program, it wasn't easy to work with..
Encore is able to work with almost all of the major video formats (AVI, MPEG4) and audio formats. Even the files I brought in from After Effects and Premiere converted. The markers that I set in After Effects and Premiere Pro convert to chapter marks in Encore. Once my video was loaded into Encore, I could edit the file in either of the original programs and then re-render. Probably one of the coolest things was that Encore updated the asset automatically after editing in the original program. No more moving the file back and forth with converting and re-converting.
I was able to navigate the menus and timelines in Encore since I was familiar with After Effects and Premiere Pro. However, even the newest user should be able to work with this program with a minimal learning curve.
The Encore interface uses a tab styled format, just like that of Adobe's other design products. This enables you to dock windows together or drag out a specific tab for more individual control. What's more is that there are great tutorials that come with the product which lead you through the creation of your DVD step by step. These tutorials are one of the main reasons the learning curve is reduced, plus the interface is easy to read and use.
ncore comes with pre-built templates for menus or you can use your own from Photoshop CS. You can even export the pre-built templates to Photoshop CS if you would like to modify them. All of the DVD menus are Photoshop PSD files. The program comes with 37 menu and object templates that provide extensive text creation capabilities as well as image-sizing and positioning controls, all of which are similar to Photoshop layers. Encore does have menu alignment and some other basic controls. However, serious designers will probably want to leave that work to the program which does it best, Photoshop CS. Once the masterpiece is created, just import it into Encore and Voila! Grab the popcorn and the remote!
Probably the most awesome feature of Encore is that you can preview your menu live. You are able to view it just like it will appear once committed to the DVD. This is a full preview with motion and sound. There's nothing worse than spending the time to put together and burn a DVD only to find out that there is something wrong with the menu.
Encore DVD fills a neat niche in the Windows XP market. With it's pricing points set at a consumer level, almost anyone can acquire this product. It is easy to use and within one hour you'll be creating your own fantastic DVD menus and firing up your Digital Camcorder to go grab some more video to play with!
In summary, Encore DVD is a great product. However, to fully maximize all of the features and capabilities of the program, be sure that your computer meets and exceeds the minimum hardware requirements and that you have Windows XP installed. It is also extremely helpful if you own any of Adobe's other products which easily compliment and integrate with Encore DVD like Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, After Effects and Premiere Pro.
Loren Elks, Group Manager
D-MAG.org
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No problems with Encore - once I figured out how to use it., November 11, 2005
Encore, as with Premiere and other high end consumer products, has a very high learning curve. There are no Windows "wizards" to help you out or guide you. I make professional grade DVD's with this ranging anywhere from 3 minutes to 2 hours. I only use Encores transcoding because nothing else that I've tried comes close to the quality and audio/video sync that Encore provides. One of the beautiful things about Encore is that it can see how much video you have and provide the best possible bit rate to get the content down to 4.7GB. The important thing is not to transcode until everything is done and you are ready to burn otherwise you may run out of space as other reviewers have noted. You also have the power to manually imput what the bitrate will be if you need that kind of control.
I have also been able to author DVD's with 5 Menu's and 9 Timelines, including motion menu's, motion buttons, "play-all override", and Menu Audio tracks. I can also create multiple audio options for each video to provide multiple languages, or maybe instead of the narration, I just want to hear a musical soundtrack behind the pictures/video which can be selected at a menu.
It also has the power of Adobe Photoshop behind the menu to create your layering.
That being said, I can create a DVD menuing system to look exactly like most any movie I rent from blockbuster, however that type of power requires a very complex interface. I did not dock any stars for the complex interface because if you make it easier, you are just going to take away fuctionality. It's the nature of the beast. So if you want to make professional looking DVD from your edited video, this is a very good product. Just make sure you purchase the tutorial, become very familiar with google and the help function, and oh yeah...it would be best if you bought Adobe Photoshop as well.
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