How will Adobe’s Encore affect the future of DVD authoring?

Adobe is poised to enter the DVD authoring industry with Encore.

With Encore, an entirely new DVD authoring application, Adobe looks to add a natural extension and a relatively seamless output option for its digital media customers, if not another industry staple follow-up to Photoshop, Premiere, and AfterEffects. Almost by its very presence in the DVD space, Adobe is positioned to change the entire DVD landscape. After all, with digital video customers in the hundreds of thousands, and an even greater number of Photoshop users potentially joining the ride, Encore has a good chance to be the last stop for many visual professionals' media. And even if Encore isn't everyone's final authoring choice, its mere presence from a company that deals in high volume marks both a maturing and broadening of DVD's acceptance.

Of course, Encore has to stand on its own as a capable tool to get any true accolades, but Adobe's well-used digital media tools offer a significant integration resource that other DVD authoring companies just do not have. While Encore was not even in beta at the time of this writing, early indications are that Adobe is prospecting in the right places.

Like other Adobe products, Encore is designed as a professional tool with an accessible interface and workflow. Its price, $549, is in line with other Adobe products and appears to fit comfortably in the space below lower-tier professional products, such as Sonic's ReelDVD and DVD Producer, and somewhat above business-oriented tools like Pinnacle Impression DVD-Pro and Ulead DVD Workshop.

According to the spec sheet and the program's interface design, Encore leans more toward the higher-end tools with some similarities to Apple's DVD Studio Pro and Sonic's DVD Producer. Adobe, however, isn't going to compete (not directly, anyway) with the $1,000 DVD Studio Pro. Encore will be a Windows-only product, where the closest competitors in price are Sonic's ReelDVD ($999), Ulead's DVD Workshop ($299), and Pinnacle Impression DVD-Pro ($399).

Adobe Encore is an abstraction-level authoring application that, like all but the highest-end products like Sonic Scenarist and DVD Creator, uses a graphic interface to access the most important capabilities of DVD authoring while distancing users from the esoteric jargon and programming minutiae of the DVD spec. This limits Encore's reach into the highest level of DVD programming: There will be no GPRM and SPRM controls or cell commands. However, it looks to offer significant jump-anywhere navigation control, including post commands, through DVD Studio Pro style pulldown menus. And it will support otherwise exclusive DVD features like region coding and parental control.

Encore will not have a common flowchart overview of an authoring project — at least not, according to Adobe, in the first version — and that may be a drawback for visually oriented authors. Instead, Encore's project view comes via a project list view that's similar to AfterEffects' and Premiere's project window, but with the sophistication of DVD Studio Pro's matrix view or the old Spruce DVD Maestro list view.

Encore's interface will use typical Adobe tabs to navigate between project view and menu creation; a timeline for linking video, audio, and subtitles (featuring Photoshop-like control of subtitle creation, but more on that later); and disc burning. There will also be another set of tabs in a very familiar, context sensitive Adobe Properties inspector. Tabs will be undockable to offer the greatest user flexibility.

Adobe says it will include a variety of menu background and buttons palettes to dramatically accelerate the process of creating simple DVD titles. Although unlike many of the more consumer-oriented authoring products that don't allow changes to templates, all Encore's palettes will be customizable and, therefore, far more useful to professionals. A built-in software MPEG-2 transcoder will allow Encore to import any video and audio media file format that the Windows Media Player can open.

Adobe's integration with other tools begins with the leveraging of Premiere and AfterEffects timeline markers, which can be imported into Encore to serve as chapter points. You'll also be able to bring DVD video clips back into Premiere, opening Premiere from a direct link in Encore, or motion menu media clips into AfterEffects for editing and have the changes automatically updated in your Encore project. That's nice because while editing and authoring at a professional level remain two separate disciplines, life and production don't always work in a perfectly linear manner.

It's in professional menu creation that Encore seems to have struck gold; at least that's the way it sounds without testing it firsthand. Most professional menus are created in Photoshop, typically prior to authoring, and those assets are imported into an authoring interface, often in accordance with strict DVD rules for color mapping. DVD Studio Pro and Pinnacle Impression can unburden users from color mapping and sub-picture syntax by using Photoshop layers to create the different button states of a DVD menu (normal, highlighted, and activated). Encore can do all that, too, but it goes one better; actually a lot better.

Encore will have a significant part of the Photoshop engine built into it. That means you'll be able to create your menus in Photoshop or directly in Encore, complete with drawing and text tools and PSD layer support. Maybe you create basic menus and buttons in Encore and realize that if you had started in Photoshop you could do more with colors and shading. No worries! Open Photoshop from a direct link in Encore and your menus are there, ready to experience the full creative power of big brother Photoshop. Save your changes and they are automatically updated back in your Encore project.

Maybe you create your menus in Photoshop out of habit, and import those into Encore, layers and all. But then you realize this button would look better more to the left against the motion menu background from AfterEffects or that the button text isn't right. No worries! You can handle repositioning of the PSD layers and make text editing changes right in Encore. Maybe you need to make changes that require Photoshop. Those changes are automatically updated because the applications share PSD data.

If you know how Photoshop and ImageReady share files and update each other's work, you have a good sense of how Encore and Photoshop will work together. But where ImageReady should have been part of Photoshop from the start and avoided the linking and auto-updating, between Encore and Photoshop it's very smart. The two disciplines need separate applications, so the integration seems ideal.

Having the Photoshop engine built into Encore can eliminate the performance shortcoming of the DVD Studio Pro layer method of menu states. There, each menu state, each layer, is literally a separate JPEG image in the final DVD build. Swapping a full-screen JPEG for any rollover can cause a performance drag on consumer DVD players. Apple added traditional color mapping to DVD Studio Pro for just that reason. With the Photoshop engine waiting, Encore can figuratively flatten the layers as a part of the disc image build and gain the robustness of 2-bit sub-pictures. That sounds like the best of both worlds.

Encore sounds promising, but the bigger picture is that Adobe is finally getting into the game. This is a boon for DVD creation. Used to high sales volumes, Adobe is betting the time is right to add a dedicated DVD tool to its marquee ensemble of digital media tools — Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and AfterEffects. DVD burners are nearing mainstream pricing, if they haven't already gotten there, and DVD players now outsell VHS VCRs in the marketplace.

Should the other DVD companies circle the wagons? Are the pioneers that worked to educate and grow the market going to be overrun by the big steam train? Perhaps, yet the DVD authoring market has been in flux for the last three to four years, and change is nothing new. It's more important that DVD authoring can become an easy and effective output format at all levels of production, from consumers to Hollywood titles.

Over the last year, most of the action in DVD has come from the consumer space. Products like Sonic's MyDVD, Ulead's DVD Movie Factory, and MedioStream's neoDVD vied to become the Windows answer to iDVD. Most recently, Roxio's Easy CD Creator added DVD authoring capabilities to its bailiwick as an addition to its abilities to simply move and manage media.

It's the professional space that doesn't need or can't afford Scenarist or even DVD Producer that's remained relatively uncharted ground. Smaller video producers who edit on desktop systems and shoot with digital camcorders have had Ulead, Pinnacle, and Sonic from which to choose, but collectively the product group has lacked focus. With Adobe entering the picture, if nothing else, that critical group of video pros is getting some major attention.