Digital Home Thoughts: Applause for Adobe's Encore DVD 1.01

Coaster Or Playable DVD?
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.


Figure 22: DVD preview in action

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.


Figure 23: Checking the links in the project


Figure 24: Getting close to finishing the project

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.


Figure 25: Project settings

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.

Conclusions
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.

All said and done, though, this is an excellent first release and it will be interesting to see how the competition reacts.