new authoring program by Adobe

[Tantabootsy]

A new release seems to come out: "Encore DVD" from Adobe might be interesting because it shall work hand in hand with Premiere, AfterEffects and PS -if it`s a good program a pretty powerful combination..
Little bit more info here: http://www.adobe.com/products/encore/main.html

[pale]

This surely looks promising. Any idea if it will support more complex structures such as seamless branching, command sequence scripts and cell commands (i.e. chapter end action)? How about DTS? Thorough integration with Photoshop looks very promising indeed as I feel that huge improvements in especially menu design can be achieved. The usability of high-end apps (Scenarist, anyone?) is rather poor and apps that are less tedious in this respect lack more advanced features (Even Maestro leaves much to be desired).

[dan]

This is pure speculation at this point, so this may be completely wrong, but Adobe licenses the DVD "engine" from Sonic [that's not speculation, as the Adobe website, a long time ago, had a little feature about their agreement...]. Encore will retail around $550 which is well below the price of the "advanced" programs [Scenarist ($X0,000), DVD Studio Pro ($1000ish)], so I think it's after the market in which programs like Sonic DVD Architect (and Vegas + DVD) and Sonic DVDit! PE are found (the $350-$800ish range). Maybe it has some of the advanced features, but it undercuts the suggested price of Sonic's own ReelDVD, which is relatively powerful, especially compared to DVDit!, but ReelDVD is about $1000 from Sonic. Encore would undercut ReelDVD by a good margin. Unless Adobe is paying an obscene amount for Sonic's technology, and is compensating Sonic for stealing its marketshare and "borrowing" its DVD codebase, I'd put it Encore somewhere above the capabilities DVDit! PE, but of course I haven't actually tried Encore, so this is, again, just speculation. I paged through the fancy product sheet on Adobe's website, and it doesn't specifically mention any of those "advanced" features. And if it does all that stuff, it'd become an alternative to Scenarist, which it would undercut in price by literally tens of thousands of dollars. Sounds doubtful. My guess is it provides, to sound like Adobe's marketing folks, 'unparalleled interaction between Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere for DVD authoring and menu design.' which is actually a pretty useful feature being that those are the programs that are probably the most commonly used for making menus.

Anyway, I'm sure someone will try it out eventually and post his/her experiences...

Thanks,
Dan

[Arky]

I'm inclined to agree with you, Dan.

Generally-speaking, I'd expect it to be analogous to Sonic Foundry's DVD Architect, since they are aiming atbasically the same market, including the NLE-integrative side of things.

I look forward to this release, but I must admit I'm not holding my breath too hard. Instead of feature sets as strong as ReelDVD's coming down in price, they seem to be staying the same, while lesser-featured programs fight to fill the spaces in between. I'm not moaning - every new addition to the market is to be welcomed, if only for increasing competition, but I still feel that MAC users are catered for way better, in terms of powerful feature sets, for the circa $1,000 mark.

All in good time. For the meantime, I will continue to author non-commercial projects using superior software, and eagerly await the day when I can venture into (powerful) commercial authoring at a sensible price.


Arky ;o)