The Essentials of Adobe Encore DVD Reviewed [Archive]

Philip Colmer

08-17-2004, 05:00 PM

<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-encoretotaltraining.jpg" /> Product Category: Video-based training Manufacturer: <a href="http://www.totaltraining.com/">Total Training</a> Where to Buy: <a href="http://www.totaltraining.com/">Total Training</a> Price: $89 USD System Requirements: A means of playing the video DVDs, although to get the most benefit, you ought to have Encore DVD available as well to work through the projects. Pros:<li>Good foundation for learning about Encore DVD; <li>Good price; <li>Comes with project material to give you something to play around with.Cons:<li>Can be a bit confusing on the first play through; <li>Does highlight some of the negative points in Encore DVD.Summary: The training is provided on a video DVD that can be played on your computer or on a TV. It covers all the critical features and functionality of Encore DVD at a price that won't break the bank. Read on for the full review!<!> <PAGEBREAK> Just The Essentials Although I am not a complete novice when it comes to authoring DVDs, having used Sonic’s ReelDVD for about a year now, Encore DVD works in a very different way, so I was interested to see what I could learn from Total Training’s "The Essentials of Adobe Encore DVD". The "Essentials" series of training titles is really aimed at giving you just that – the knowledge and understanding that you need to get started with the tool in front of you and at a lower price. Unlike other TT products such as those for Premiere Pro and After Effects, "Essentials" is a single DVD plus a project DVD. The sum length of the training videos provided is just under three hours. "The Essentials of Adobe Encore DVD" is presented by Daniel Brown who has the rather intriguing title of "Senior Evangelist for Digital Video and Motion Graphics for Adobe Systems Inc". He shares a Website with other Adobe evangelists at <a href="http://www.adobeevangelists.com/">http://www.adobeevangelists.com/</a>. The DVD Content The flow of the lessons on the DVD is, as with other Total Training products, very logical and progressive:<li> The Adobe Encore DVD Interface; <li> Assembling Timelines; <li> Creating Subtitles; <li> Building Menus; <li> Previewing; <li> Transcoding & Building the DVD; <li> Beyond the Basics.The first time I watched the DVD, I hadn’t done much experimenting with Encore – I wanted to learn, if possible, how to use it from the DVD without opening the manual. During that first play, I felt that some of the material, particularly in the first section dealing with the interface, was a bit out of order. Daniel was covering some material that it might have been better to hold back for a later lesson. However, after starting to use Encore in earnest and trying to put together a complete project of my own, a second viewing of the Total Training DVD made more sense and did flow better. The point here is that a complete Encore novice might have the same problem and feel that the flow of the first lesson isn’t as smooth & progressive as it could be. Good Learning To Be Had There is a lot of good material in this training product – some of the training provided explains things that are not covered properly in the manual, like setting poster frames for chapter points. The section on building menus is the largest lesson on the DVD, running to just over an hour, and this is time well spent. Menus in Encore are the most flexible aspect of the product compared to other DVD authoring tools and you really have to have a very good understanding of how they work if you are going to get the most out of them. The unexpected bonus is the section "Beyond The Basics" where Daniel covers two essential areas - overrides and button routing - plus a topic that bemused me - button rollovers. Why bemused? Well, button rollovers are in fairly common use on Websites now, where the image changes as the mouse moves over them, but it had never really occurred to me that someone would want to reproduce this functionality on a DVD - particularly since it is something that a DVD isn't supposed to be able to do and therefore is quite tricky to emulate. Whether the end result is worth the effort or not is a subjective matter. There is no doubt in my mind, though, that video training is more successful at explaining how to use products like Premiere Pro and Encore than reading the manuals. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, so how many words does a video replace? Do As I Say - Not As I Do Although Daniel does an excellent job of explaining everything, knowing of his role within Adobe caused me to get frustrated at times. The reason for the frustration was because there were a few times when, as a prelude to explaining how a particular feature worked, he would start by telling how he hadn't understood the feature. An example of this was importing pre-built subtitles, where you are presented with a view of the image and you have to identify the background colour, the outline colour and the fill colour. Daniel starts off by telling how he thought the purpose of that window was to allow you to specify what colours you wanted to use, rather than setting up the mappings. It struck me that, although this might be his teaching style, I felt that explaining how something doesn't work could end up confusing people as they then struggle to take on board the important information of how it actually does work. Another example of confusion reigning is over the issue of pixel aspect ratios. Computers use pixels that are square, while DV footage uses pixels that are not square (they have a 0.9 width to height ratio). This can cause problems, for example, if you create an image in Photoshop (square pixels) and then import it into Premiere or Encore and wonder why your circles aren’t round any more. All of the Adobe products that interact with digital video have some way of dealing with pixel aspect ratios, normally by compensating in the display of the image. Encore is no exception but it has two different ways of handling it! If you are looking at a menu and toggle the pixel aspect ratio button, the software reduces the width of the menu in order to correct the aspect ratio. However, the DVD preview window increases the height of the menu in order to correct the aspect ratio. Daniel spends quite a bit of time taking the viewer through this difference, which is very laudable but, as I felt earlier, this leads to confusion in my opinion and also to the view that Adobe really should have found a way of making the software operate in a consistent manner. As an aside, I do love the way that he uses the word "anomaly" when he describes behaviour that isn’t correct – something that you or I might call a bug :-) Conclusions If you are new to DVD authoring or don't have a lot of time to spend working your way through the manual, this is a good product to help you get off the starting block with Encore DVD. The price is good (although I suspect some readers will still think it is too high) and, given the title, the balance of content is just right. If you are completely new to Encore, you will probably want to watch this several times and use Encore at the same time in order to really benefit from having video training at your fingertips.