Adobe Encore DVD

At last, Encore DVD has arrived. It's been more than three years since rumours of an Adobe DVD-authoring package started circulating, which makes you wonder why it took so long. DVD authoring seemed like the next logical step for a company that already had the DVD menu market tied up with Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator. But now Encore is here and looks set to storm the DVD-authoring world.

As with most authoring packages, Encore hides the intricacies of DVD programming behind its friendly interface. So all the hard work is done behind the scenes and it's suitable for both professionals and people with no DVD knowledge.

There are four tabs in the main authoring area, which cover the entire authoring process. The first is Project, where assets are imported and stored and transcoding parameters are set. Encore has an integrated Main Concepts encoding engine for MPEG, Dolby and sample rate conversions. The Menu tab, meanwhile, houses the Menu Editor followed by a Timeline tab, which includes a monitor for viewing assets, as well as a timeline for adding chapter points and multiple audio and subtitle streams. Finally, there's the Disc tab, where build options such as region encoding are added before outputting the final build.

Despite its comparatively affordable price, Encore is aimed firmly at the professional market, going head-to-head with packages such as Apple DVD Studio Pro and Sonic ReelDVD 3. There's some stiff competition, but Adobe has familiarity on its side. If you've worked with other Adobe products, you'll feel at home with Encore's similar design and accessible drag-and-drop interface.

Adobe is also going big on Encore's integration with other Adobe products. This includes After Effects and Premiere, where markers are imported as chapter points, but the main emphasis is on the relationship between Photoshop and Encore's Menu Editor. This is a powerful tool, which enables you to design menus with colour subpicture mapping in Photoshop or directly in Encore via drag-and-drop. The latter still provides full layer support and design tools to edit text within the project window, but you can then launch Photoshop for anything more advanced, and any changes are instantly viewable in both packages.

Some authoring packages already allow layered menu backgrounds and subpictures, but they often build the DVD menu layers as separate images, which can slow down navigation on set-top boxes. Adobe, however, has sidestepped this issue by flattening the menus like Photoshop, and the result is smooth navigation, which worked fine on several set-top boxes in our tests.

Adobe quite rightly sees the quality of the Menu Editor and the integration with Photoshop as a major marketing coup, but it's also quite limited, as you can only import menus in PSD format, which is bad news for Paint Shop Pro users. This will also be a bitter pill for many Professional DVD graphics artists, who may be used to creating separate subpictures and menus as TIFFs.

This isn't the only limitation either. Like Premiere Pro (see issue 108, p82), Encore only supports Windows XP, and there's also no support for Multi-Angle video, button highlights over video tracks (unless placed in menu space) and DTS audio. It's also severely lacking in the interactivity and navigation departments, which are the milestones by which to judge authoring packages. Its lack of support for open manipulation of GPRM (General Purpose Register Memory) and SPRM (System Parameter Register Memory), which allow a form of coding within DVDs, makes it a non-starter for a lot of serious commercial work too.