Participating Frequently

Question

Encore replacement Software

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
June 20, 2013
5 replies
40364 views

Please give me suggestions for Adobe compeditors to DVD and Blu Ray authoring since I can no longer rely on Adobe as they are dropping Encore becasue its so 2010 and discs are not the future (what a load of BS)

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

Please let me know what you find. I am having the same problem. I purchased Production Studio which included Encore DVD and now I cannot use it becuase Adobe won't let me reguister it! WHat the heck?

Please let me know if you find a solution

neil wilkes

Legend

NixPixKix wrote
Please let me know what you find. I am having the same problem. I purchased Production Studio which included Encore DVD and now I cannot use it becuase Adobe won't let me reguister it! WHat the heck?
Please let me know if you find a solution

For just DVD, right now I would recommend Media Chance Labs DVD Lab Pro 2.

Right now it can be bought for under $100 - around $90 or thereabouts, and it really is seriously good.

There is a trial version, and it does everything we used to wish Encore would - the sole problem with it is the lack of preview, so you need to compile before being able to preview a disc. In reality though this is actually a good thing as you are then test playing the actual multiplexed VOB structures, not independent assets.

You have got a very user-friendly abstraction layer, and you can also over-rule this with custom scripting or, if feeling really confident, turn off the Abstraction Layer altogether & code everything manually - this can be a great way to work, as you know there is no junk code or orphaned timelines & dummy menus you did not specifically create cluttering things up & generally getting in the way.

There are several pages of tutorials, including advanced stuff such as panoramic menus, switched menus etc. as well as a forum for support (sadly not as well visited as in times gone by, but the folks who are there really do know their stuff and you can also always drop me an email - I know the tool pretty well by now.

What it will not do is create a DDP Master for replication, however. To do that a separate application would be needed (GEARImage, Sonoris DDP creator, GEAR Pro Mastering Edition etc) or else a replication company that will accept a burned disc or an ISO image (with correct Layer Break setting for DL discs) in which case our old friend IMGBurn will get the job done.

You will also be well advised to grab a copy of PGCEdit, and give a donation of at least $50 to the developer, as it is nagware and you literally cannot live without it in DVD land. Your donation will get you personal support via email from the developer & this tool is so good I literally cannot imagine not having it available. Once a video_TS is compiled, this will let you edit absolutely everything right down to the button commands, adding pre/post commands & even cell commands, change the navigation, the colours of buttons, the way it all works & what goes to where etc. It is a swiss army knife of DVD production and it is awesome.

Encore should never have been killed off, but please remember it was not Adobe's decision to do this but Rovi Corp, who bought out Sonic Solutions in a hostile takeover and promptly shut them down within months, killing all support a year later. Scenarist LLC are back now, but although new seats are available they are still a few thousand for the Scenarist SD version, and it is a five figure sum for Scenarist BD.

DVD-Lab Pro will do everything you need it to I reckon - give it a test drive

C

cvid01

Inspiring

Good information. But what I like about Encore is the ability to make customized menus using Photoshop. I'm not sure of any other DVD authoring program gives such a wide range for designing menus.

neil wilkes

Legend

AlistairGraham wrote:
Please give me suggestions for Adobe compeditors to DVD and Blu Ray authoring since I can no longer rely on Adobe as they are dropping Encore becasue its so 2010 and discs are not the future (what a load of BS)

Indeed it is pure BS. The main reason Encore is dead is (I suspect) because Rovi have killed Sonic off completely - which is to my mind a nasty thing to do because their main business is streaming media and it seems they bought Sonic in order to kill them off & remove the main competitor. Streaming on demand means you pay every time you watch a film, assuming you have

A - a fast enough internet connection, and

B - an unrestricted one (most are not, despite the adverts saying "completely unrestricted" they will be throttled back under the small print "fair use" terms). The internet is one of the few areas where "unrestricted" does not mean unrestricted, rather like telephone companies saying the same thing with "unlimited" that turns out to be nothing of the sort.

Thanks to Rovi killing off Scenariost SD/BD and all the MPEG-2 encoding tools, things are difficult.

I am not sure what else is still available except for Sony's DVD Architect (definitely a going concern, and unless you include DVDSP it leaves Sony as the only player left now) and - perhaps - Media Chance Lab's "DVD Lab Pro 2" - I will check with the writers to see if new licenses are still available.

DLP (as we know DVD-Lab Pro) is a very, very good tool. It does have issues but these can all be worked around and I am waiting to find out of new licenses are still available.

Support for this tool is also very good - one of the mainstays in the forums knows more about this app than I can begin to describe & it is very good indeed.

I would also recommend any DVD authors to get a copy of the wonderful PGCEdit. It's donationware, but well worth $50 of anybody's money as it allows you to edit a compiled Video_TS without having to go back into authoring again.

The other fly in the ointment will of course be getting product to replication as Encore's DDP & CSS functions are seriously unreliable and the layer break routine is a joke.

GEAR Pro Mastering Edition is the way forward here and there will soon be an update to this that will, when you create a new project as a DVD9, look for all valid layer break points & give you the choice before master DDP files are created. GPME will also handle CSS scrambling (and does it properly, unlike Encore) and is in my opinion invaluable.

BluRay is harder - there are now only 2 applications that can output spec legal BDCMF folders with AACS applied (mandatory).for replication (again, Encore cannot do this at all and required an addon to manage this. Both are owned/coded by Sony Creative Media.

1 - DoStudio. This comes as a modular tool, and starts very cheaply indeed with the DoStudio Indie option (Straight BDMV only) or the EX addon module, and you can also get the BD-J module as well as a 3D module. Unlike Scenarist, the basic version is fully expandable.

2 - BluPrint. This is Sony's top-of-the-line tool, and you will need a remortgage to get into this one.

DoStudio is suitable for beginners to intermediate users and requires a good working knowledge of PhotoShop. This is the tool we use (we run DoStudio EX with BD-J module) and have made several successfully replicated titles that passed folder/content verification from Sony DADC with no trouble at all.

http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/dvdlabpro.html

http://download.videohelp.com/r0lZ/pgcedit/index.html

http://www.gearsoftware.com/pro-mastering.php

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/dostudio

The demise of Encore is a sad day, I believe, as it could have been so good if only the bugs had been nailed, and support for more advanced operations added via scripting.

DLP requires a certain amount of knowledge of the structure of DVD - Encore's abstraction layer boxed it into a corner to a great extent and the way every timeline became a new VTS was a nightmare of complexity, as it forced nearly all menus into the VMGM domain. It is full-spec, and there is very little it cannot do.

B

bigmanfontu

Participant

If you're primarily going to be making DVD's, I would try DVDRemake Pro. It's not the most user friendly, and requires knowledge of registers and the DVD structure, but it makes up for it by being extremely powerful.

I generally design my DVD menus in photoshop, compile with Encore and then put the DVD's together with DVDRemake Pro, mostly because Encore doesn't support DVD navigation programming.

You can check it out here: http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/

neil wilkes

Legend

bigmanfontu wrote:
If you're primarily going to be making DVD's, I would try DVDRemake Pro. It's not the most user friendly, and requires knowledge of registers and the DVD structure, but it makes up for it by being extremely powerful.
I generally design my DVD menus in photoshop, compile with Encore and then put the DVD's together with DVDRemake Pro, mostly because Encore doesn't support DVD navigation programming.
You can check it out here: http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/

Interesting - is that for Mac?

On PC we have something called PGCEdit - it allows 100% complete access to all navigational/menu/buttons etc and you can edit what is alteady compiled.

The biggest problem with Encore is the way that it turns each timeline into a single clip VTS - the amount of dummy menus required is insane.