Having completed my first major project in Encore 2.0 I thought I would share some of my experiences. My project was basically a family album DVD I had been meaning to do for years. The content for this DVD consisted of
About 350 scanned photographs
About 200 digital photographs
Video Footage taken on a MiniDV camcorder
Motion Menus with Audio sound track
There are about 30 menus in the project mainly because there is a family tree and each person has their own menu, and there are sub menus for weddings etc.
b Thoughts having built the project:
Apart from one time, when I was having major problems with the UI taking forever to respond, I have really enjoyed using Encore 2.0 which came as part of my recently purchased production studio.
I like the UI and the ability to use a flowchart to define the flow of content. I also like the ability to tailor existing menus or design new ones in Photoshop.
My only negative thought about Encore 2.0 is the way it handles assets when the application regains focus. In short, if you are (for example) editing a menu in Photoshop and then return to Encore it enumerates all of its assets again. If you have, as in this project, 500+ stills this is just a no no. So my work around this was to create a mpg slide show in another application and import this as a single asset into Encore. The only downside of this is that you loose the ability to have file names as subtitles. But given that, by adopting this approach, the UI delays reduce to a very acceptable level, I think the benefits far out way the drawback.
b One major advantage of handing stills in this way is that disk rendering time is reduced from 3 hours to 5 minutes a definite improvement :)
In short I like it and if anyone has the production studio premium and hasnt yet played with Encore I would recommend they give it a try
Dave
About 350 scanned photographs
About 200 digital photographs
Video Footage taken on a MiniDV camcorder
Motion Menus with Audio sound track
There are about 30 menus in the project mainly because there is a family tree and each person has their own menu, and there are sub menus for weddings etc.
b Thoughts having built the project:
Apart from one time, when I was having major problems with the UI taking forever to respond, I have really enjoyed using Encore 2.0 which came as part of my recently purchased production studio.
I like the UI and the ability to use a flowchart to define the flow of content. I also like the ability to tailor existing menus or design new ones in Photoshop.
My only negative thought about Encore 2.0 is the way it handles assets when the application regains focus. In short, if you are (for example) editing a menu in Photoshop and then return to Encore it enumerates all of its assets again. If you have, as in this project, 500+ stills this is just a no no. So my work around this was to create a mpg slide show in another application and import this as a single asset into Encore. The only downside of this is that you loose the ability to have file names as subtitles. But given that, by adopting this approach, the UI delays reduce to a very acceptable level, I think the benefits far out way the drawback.
b One major advantage of handing stills in this way is that disk rendering time is reduced from 3 hours to 5 minutes a definite improvement :)
In short I like it and if anyone has the production studio premium and hasnt yet played with Encore I would recommend they give it a try
Dave