Philip Colmer
07-07-2004, 05:00 PM
<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Cover.jpg" /><br /><br /><b>Product Category:</b> DVD authoring software<br /><b>Manufacturer:</b> <a href="http://www.adobe.com/">Adobe Systems Inc</a><br /><b>Where to Buy:</b> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AJXWX/ref%253Dase%255Fjasondunn-20/jasondunn-20">Amazon (affiliate link)</a><br /><b>Price:</b> $560.49 USD (Amazon)<br /><b>System Requirements:</b> Intel Pentium III 800MHz or faster processor, Windows XP Professional or Home Edition, 256MB of RAM (512MB or more recommended), 1GB of available harddisc space for installation, 5GB of available harddisc space recommended for extra content, 10GB of larger harddisc recommended for ongoing work, 1280x1024 32 bit colour display with 16MB VRAM or more, DVD-ROM drive, stereo sound card.<br /><br /><b>Pros:</b><li>Excellent support for DVD features;<br /><li>Sophisticated menu creation;<br /><li>Broad support for asset formats.<b>Cons:</b><ul><li>Requires Photoshop for maximum benefit.</ul><b>Summary:</b><br />Encore DVD is Adobe's first DVD authoring product. In some respects, notably stability, it is definitely a 1.0 release (and has already been replaced by version 1.5) but it has a very strong feature set that beats almost all other Windows DVD authoring tools.<br /><br />Read on for the full review!<!><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Installation</b></span><br />Installing Adobe Encore DVD is very straightforward - put the disc in the drive and step through the installer options. One thing that did catch my eye was a clause in the terms and conditions that you have to accept before you can install the product. Now normally I don't really bother reading Ts & Cs because I work on the basis that if I don't agree to them, I can't use the product, so I might just as well say yes anyway. Encore DVD was no exception, apart from the fact that some words stood out in the early paragraphs - <br /><br /><i>2.4. Portable Computer Use. The primary user of the Computer on which the Software is installed may also make a second copy for his or her exclusive use on a portable Computer provided the Software on the portable Computer is not being used at the same time the Software on the primary computer is being used.</i><br /><br />Full marks to Adobe for understanding that some owners have two systems - a desktop & a laptop - and that they can install it on both. Let's see that extended to your other products, please.<br /><br />An area where the installation could be improved, I think, is with regard to the Goodies folder. This folder contains additional buttons, menu backgrounds and other useful assets. However, if you want to use them with Encore, you have to copy the contents of each of the folders within the Goodies folder into the Library folder that forms part of the Encore installation. This is a very manual process and, as such, prone to mistakes. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of the installation programmer to come up with a means of adding these files to the Library folder automatically with the user being given the choice of how much of the Goodies folder to import.<br /><br />A final note on installation - the DVD contained version 1.0 so I installed the version 1.0.1 update as it fixes a number of problems in the initial release. Adobe have now released version 1.5 and there are some differences in the capabilities between the two versions. Therefore, some of the points made below about version 1.0.1 may not apply to the current release.<br /><br /><span><b>Supported Filetypes</b></span><br />For the video and audio content in a DVD, Encore can accept almost any format - the limitations are pretty much just that the format must be supported by DirectX. The notable exception that the Encore help points out is QuickTime. If the content is not already in a form suitable for use on a DVD (i.e. MPEG 2 and PCM or Dolby Digital audio) then Encore can transcode the content into the appropriate form.<br /><br />For menus, Encore supports the building up of menus from a background image with buttons on top, or you can use a PhotoShop file with these layers already defined.<br /><br /><span><b>Creating The Project</b></span><br />After you start Encore, you are presented with a fairly empty window, as shown in Figure 1.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig1.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 1: The initial Encore window</i><br /><br />Both the smaller windows shown can be moved out of the Encore window. In addition, each of the tabbed sections can be pulled into its own window. This gives you maximum flexibility when laying out your desktop space. I would have appreciated an option, however, to have made these floating windows stay within the bounds of the Encore window. That way, if I drag the Encore window to another part of the desktop, the floating windows would move as well. Unlike Adobe Premiere, there isn't an option to save the layout - I guess this is because Encore is a much simpler application and doesn't really have different workflow needs, unlike Premiere.<br /><br />When you create a new project, Encore asks for the television standard being used - NTSC or PAL. If you always create DVDs for the same television standard, it is possible to turn this question off. Once the project has been started, the Encore window starts to look a bit busier, as Figure 2 shows.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig2.gif" /><br /><i>Figure 2: Encore with a new project</i><br /><br />When you import content, it appears under the Project tab and, as with Adobe Premiere, you can create folders to help you organise the content as Figure 3 shows.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig3.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 3: A project with some content</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig4.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 4: Transcode presets for NTSC projects</i><br /><br />You can also see in Figure 3 that the project window shows you the type, duration and transcode settings for the content. Figure 4 shows the default presets that Encore offers when you have selected NTSC as the television standard. The principle differences between the various presets come down to:<li> The display ratio of the video - 16x9 or 4x3;<br /><li> Variable or constant bitrates;<br /><li> Quality of the video transcoding;<br /><li> Progressive or interlaced.By leaving the transcode settings on automatic, Encore will do the best job it can given the available disc space. However, if you are working on a sophisticated project similar in style to a movie DVD, you might want to select the appropriate preset for each clip yourself, e.g. a high quality VBR preset for the main presentation and then perhaps a lower quality preset for the extras so that they take up less space.<br /><br />It is possible to edit the settings for each of the provided presets, as shown in Figure 5 and the settings offered are very similar to the export settings supported by Premiere. Unfortunately, the process of creating your own preset isn't very intuitive - you have to start by modifying an existing preset and the moment you do, the preset name changes to "Custom". When you click on the save icon, you are prompted for a name for the preset and it then gets added to the list. Not only is that not intuitive but it is also inconsistent with another part of Encore, namely creating timeline colour sets where there is an explicit icon to create a new set.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig5.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 5: Editing transcoding settings</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig6.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 6: Transcoding video options</i><br /><br />Video for DVDs always has to be in MPEG-2 format but you have a lot of control over the way your video files are transcoded into MPEG-2 and this is one of the areas that separates products like Encore from the cheaper products. The cheaper tools typically have one or two very simple presets that might concentrate on the bitrate and not much else.<br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig7.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 7: Transcoding audio options</i><br /><br />Figure 7 shows the audio options and, whilst there are fewer of them, the choices can appear to be just as complicated. If you select Dolby Digital, the audio format is Dolby Digital Stereo. It isn't possible to do 5.1 encoding with Encore, even if you've installed it on a computer that has Premiere with the SurCode 5.1 encoder on it. So, if you want to do 5.1 surround encoding, it has to be done within Premiere first and then exported to Encore as pre-built files that don't need any further transcoding. Still, that probably isn't a bad thing as Premiere does have very good audio tools for precise setting up of the audio mix and, in addition, it is possible to set chapter points within the Premiere timeline that get preserved & understood by Encore when it opens the MPEG file - this is a <b>very</b> useful feature as it means that any subsequent editing done in Premiere doesn't lead to manual chapter point editing in Encore.<br /><br /><span><b>Setting Up The Timelines</b></span><br />Once you've collected the assets together, you need to place them into timelines. A timeline is used to present a sequence of video or still clips. Figure 8 shows a very simple timeline consisting of a number of still pictures whilst Figure 9 shows a timeline that has got four audio tracks and a subtitle track to go with the video track. One difference to note between a stills timeline and a video timeline is that the latter can only contain one video clip whilst the former can contain multiple stills.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig8.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 8: Timeline with stills and chapter points</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig9.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 9: A more complicated timeline with video, multiple audio tracks and subtitles</i><br /><br />You can see from Figure 9 that each of the audio tracks and the subtitle track has a language setting against it. This serves two purposes - the first is that when the user first puts the disc into the drive, the DVD player will automatically select the correct language track if there is one that matches the player's defined language setting otherwise it selects the default track. The second is that if the user decides to change audio or subtitle tracks through the DVD player's own interface, they can see the language choices available to them. One of the great things about Encore though, compared with other authoring tools, is that you can create buttons in menus that allow the user to select which audio & subtitle options they want - something that you often see on movie DVDs but that isn't always possible in a home-grown DVD.<br /><br />With regard to the subtitle support within Encore, there are four supported methods of creating subtitles:<li> Creating a subtitle track in a timeline, navigate to the point in time where you want the subtitle to appear, drag out the text box and type the text in;<br /><li> Import a text file that defines the start and end time along with the text to be displayed;<br /><li> Import subtitles created by Captions Inc. This consists of a text file that defines the start & end time, along with the name of the pre-created image file containing the subtitles;<br /><li> Import subtitles created by FAB. As with Captions Inc, the text file defines the start & end time and the name of the pre-created image files.With both formats, because the images are pre-defined, you have to indicate to Encore the background colour, the outer colour and the fill colour used, as shown in Figure 10. In practice, I found picking the outline colour very difficult - it would be better if there was an option to zoom into the image so that the outline colour is easier to hit.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig10.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 10: Picking the colour mappings for subtitles</i><br /><br />If you aren't working with pre-created image files, the next best method, particularly if you've been provided the source files by a client, is the importing of a text file. As you can see from Figure 11, there are <b>plenty</b> of options available to you in order to get just the look that you want. The window displays a frame from the timeline, along with the text bounding box and the first subtitle text. One of the really useful features here is that whilst you can adjust the size & position of the text bounding box, Encore won't let you move that box outside the title safe area. This ensures that your subtitles will always be visible on the screen.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig11.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 11: Importing subtitles through a text file</i><br /><br />What is nice is that you can, after you've imported the text, go back through the subtitles and make alterations within the text. Not only can you edit the text itself, but you can change the position of the subtitle on the screen, change the font attributes for a selected portion of the text and so on. It isn't possible to make these changes with FAB & Caption Inc subtitles because they are stored as image files.<br /><br />When the subtitles are displayed over the image, the colours used are taken from the colour set specified for the current timeline. Each timeline can only use one colour set, and a colour set can contain three colour definitions, as shown in Figure 12. Each subtitle clip can use one of the three definitions, thus allowing colours to change in the subtitles as they are played back, but not complete flexibility. As you can see from the screenshot, it is possible to vary the opacity of each of the three colours used. In Figure 13, you can see a zoomed in portion of a subtitle where I've deliberately set the anti-alias colour to red so that you can see how Encore uses the three colours to render the text. Another useful feature of the timeline colour set tool is the preview checkbox. This allows you to see the effect of the changes you make, but it isn't necessarily an option you want ticked all of the time as Encore took several seconds every time I made a change. There was also a bug where changing the colour didn't actually change the preview unless I changed the opacity, thus having a seriously negative effect on the usefulness of this feature.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig12.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 12: Defining subtitle colour sets</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig13.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 13: Three colours in a subtitle</i><br /><br /><span><b>Building The Navigation</b></span><br />Now to the bit where commercial discs vary a lot in their capabilities but almost always exceed the possibilities available from consumer DVD authoring tools - the disc navigation. Menus consist of a background, buttons and subpictures - a DVD term used to describe the means of changing the appearance of a button when it is selected or activated with the remote control or mouse. Encore supports two types of menu - still and motion. A still menu is composed of static images. There is no moving footage or audio. A motion menu, by comparison, does include moving footage or audio. For example, a video can play in the background of the menu, a button can include a thumbnail image of the video to which it is linked, or you can have audio playing.<br /><br />Encore supports four different ways of creating a menu - from menu templates such as those included on the DVD, from predesigned buttons and backgrounds, from any asset in the project or by creating it in Photoshop. The menu templates are accessed through the Library palette, as shown in Figure 14 - filtered using the bottom left-hand button to show only menu assets.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig14.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 14: Menus in the Library</i><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig15.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 15: A menu created from a template</i><br /><br />Creating a new menu from the current selection results in Figure 15. What isn't readily apparent from the screenshot is that the four buttons aren't part of the background image. Adobe have been really smart with menu creation in Encore - it understands the Photoshop file format and uses it to its advantage by using layers and layer sets. A button, for example, is defined as a layer set with several layers performing key tasks. The layers palette is used to manipulate the menu settings and the layers in Figure 15 can be seen in Figure 16. Encore uses a very precise naming convention to indicate which layer does what. The layering of subpictures in a button is extremely powerful and makes it very easy to create sophisticated buttons that can make the most of the subpicture limitations imposed by the DVD standard.<br /><br />The biggest shame, though, about the tight integration between Encore and Photoshop is that you really need Photoshop (or an alternative product that can read & write PSD files) in order to get the most out of Encore. It is a shame that Adobe don't bundle Photoshop with Encore or, at least, a version of Photoshop that has been crippled to only exchange files with Encore.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig16.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 16: Layers in the menu</i><br /><br />Where things really start to get interesting is if the button includes a layer that has been defined as a link to a timeline. Encore will automatically take a poster frame from the specified timeline or, even better, you can instruct Encore to animate the buttons. What happens then is that Encore causes the buttons to play the timeline contents. One restriction of this feature is that it is an all or nothing feature - all the buttons in the current menu do this, or none. At this point, it is important to understand something about DVD menus, though, and that is that they do not, in reality, consist of multiple layers with little video clips in them. What Encore does is render the animated menu into an MPEG2 file and the DVD player then plays that movie. This is actually the process needed if you want to create animated menus in other products like ReelDVD, so you can see how Encore makes life a <b>lot</b> easier. You are pretty much only limited by your ability to create interesting buttons. Figure 17 shows some buttons in a menu created from the Entertainment Submenu. The Scene B button has been linked to a chapter point in a timeline, while the Scene C button hasn't. For a given chapter point, you can specify the poster frame used, thus providing excellent flexibility. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig17.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 17: Buttons linked to timelines</i><br /><br />The flexibility continues with the settings that can be applied to the menu itself, as shown in Figure 18. Encore exposes more of the DVD Video standard here than a lot of other authoring tools. For example, suppose you've got a series of video clips and you want to provide a separate button to play each clip, with an additional button that plays all of the clips sequentially. Such a scenario is very common to "extras" found in commercial DVDs - but how many authoring tools have the flexibility to reproduce this without unnecessary duplication of the video clips? It can be done <i>very</i> easily in Encore :D.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig18.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 18: Menu properties</i><br /><br />I briefly mentioned the subpicture layer for buttons and, like subtitles, it is possible to define the colours that are used. Menus have different colour sets from timelines but a similar interface for managing the colours, as shown in Figure 19. Subpictures are horribly complicated but, with a bit of effort, you can get some stunning results from them and the help text that comes with Encore goes a long way to explaining how to get some of those effects. If you are manually creating a button, it is possible to get Encore to automatically create an outline subpicture by selecting the appropriate layers within the button to set the bounding box to be used. However, for more creative results, you will want to use a tool like Photoshop.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig19.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 19: Menu colour set management</i><br /><br />Once you've created your menus and buttons, it is time to link the buttons to the actions which will be to other menus or to chapter points in a timeline. Again, Encore exposes great DVD functionality, such as being able to specify the button to be selected when the menu is jumped to. In addition to linking the buttons to their actions, if you've got more than one button on a menu, it is usual to define the movement between buttons when a user presses on the navigation buttons on the remote control - in other words, the button routing. Encore can do this automatically, and Figure 18 shows the checkbox near the bottom of the properties window that has this feature enabled. Encore doesn't do a bad job of sorting the routing out, but it does depend heavily on the buttons being aligned in some way. At the end of the day, if the automatic routing doesn't work for you, you can always turn it off and do it yourself.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig20.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 20: Displaying the button routing</i><br /><br />Figure 20 shows how Encore displays the routing between buttons in a menu. The centre number within the cross is the number for that button. The numbers in the north, south, east & west positions are the identifier of the button that would become selected if the user pressed the corresponding navigation button. Manually setting up the button routing is very intuitive - a case of dragging from the appropriate point on the cross to the button required, as illustrated in Figure 21.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig21.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 21: Changing the routing</i><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Coaster Or Playable DVD?</b></span><br />Encore provides a couple of tools that you really ought to use before committing your project to a disc. The first is the preview mode, as shown in Figure 22. This is more than just playing through the disc as the controls below the video section give you control over audio & subtitle selection, feedback on which timeline is playing, the chapter, the timecode & the format, buttons to emulate a DVD player's remote control and a few extra buttons that can help with the authoring process. For example, there is a button that skips to the end of the current timeline in order to execute the end action - useful for testing the linkage without having to watch a 2 hour video first :D.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig22.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 22: DVD preview in action</i><br /><br />The second tool that Encore provides is shown in Figure 23 and is accessible from the Disc tab of the project window (shown in Figure 24). The check links tool is an automated mechanism for spotted the most common errors that occur during the lifetime of a project. Double-clicking on an entry causes the appropriate window to open and the object in error to be selected, ready for the properties to be set appropriately.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig23.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 23: Checking the links in the project</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig24.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 24: Getting close to finishing the project</i><br /><br />In addition to the project content, you can add DVD-ROM content by browsing to a folder and all of the folder contents will be added to the DVD. You can also adjust the project settings, as shown in Figure 25. Most of these, however, will only be relevant if you are writing the project to DLT tape for sending to a duplication facility. This is because pretty much all of them only apply to commercially made DVDs. The only setting that can be seen as useful in a personal environment is the disc size, where you may want to reduce it to 650 or 700MB if you want to create a CD of DVD material - something that is useful for playback on a computer but not compatible with any home player.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/Colmer-Encore-Fig25.gif" /> <br /><i>Figure 25: Project settings</i><br /><br />When you are finally set to go, Encore allows you to burn directly to a disc, create the folder structure on a hard disc (useful for playing back with software players like PowerDVD, perhaps in a kiosk environment) or as an image file, to be burnt to disc later. The "Build Project" button shown in Figure 24 actually will only burn a disc, but you do have the flexibility of choosing the current project or a previously created folder structure or image file. To create that structure or file, you need to use options off the File menu. The terminology used here is very confusing and I think Adobe should do some work here to make it easier to understand.<br /><br /><span><b>Conclusions</b></span><br />Well, I hope you stuck with me to the end. There is no doubt that Encore is an extremely capable DVD authoring product. It offers a very strong set of DVD Video features - more than most previously available Windows tools. There are some places where the user interface is inconsistent or confusing but it should be remembered that this is a 1.0 release product for Adobe - indeed, they have already released version 1.5, although you have to pay for the privilege unless you had bought Encore very close to the announcement date. There is also scope for adding more features - for example, I would like to see Adobe solve the problem of how you get the most out of Encore if you don't own Photoshop.<br /><br />All said and done, though, this is an excellent first release and it will be interesting to see how the competition reacts.