No Encore CC

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

You could check out Sony Architect as an option. It comes as a bundle with Sony Vegas. It allows menus etc, but I haven't compared it with Encore and it is PC.

CD Architect 5.2 Overview

Windows only of course although it may fwell unction in a VMware Fusion virtual machine on a Mac. I was amazed to hear the other day that people are using Edius in a VM without problems.

[Mike Beckett]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

Windows only of course although it may fwell unction in a VMware Fusion virtual machine on a Mac. I was amazed to hear the other day that people are using Edius in a VM without problems.

Plus it only seems to do CDs!

Sony have this: DVD Architect Studio 5.0 Overview

But at £25 I'm not sure if it is fully-featured enough for me (i.e. full control over menu building). One will investigate later on.

I'm happy if good ol' buggy Encore remains an option and is still accessible from the CC download for now though.

[Craig Seeman]

Adobe is not pulling Encore CS6 from the market. If one's clients are frozen in time then you'll have the software equally frozen. It may be a concern that bugs won't get fixed and given the risk that an OS update may eventually break it, one may need to have a system equally frozen.

None of this changes the broader market condition that there's no reason for a company to continue to commit resources to a product that has a declining user base. Declining doesn't mean zero user base. It means it's no longer a product that will generate new subscriptions nor be a deciding factor in people leaving their subscriptions. They've likely determined it generates no new revenue and may not even sustain revenue.

In fact Adobe, apparently like Apple, has a motive to push you into new forms of interactive design and delivery.

Adobe, for example, mentions iPad compatible files with chapter markers. They also make software for HTML5 interactive design (and of course Flash but that's another issue).

I have a hunch, if you looked at the current marked and compared the exponential growth of tablet sales compared to the sales of Blu-ray players, the expanding market of SmartTV, Roku, AppleTV sales as well, the numbers will show the market direction. It shows where the consumer is headed. It shows where business to consumer and business to business marketing is headed. The growth numbers in those markets compared to interactive menu driven disc (no one is ending the ability to create optical disc based "screeners" or even putting files on optical disc to deliver a physical medium) are concretely visible to Adobe as it was to Apple preceding them.

Chapter markers are here to stay. The ability to have separate videos whether download or on disc are certainly still here. Physical medium delivery is not gone. Optical discs are still here. It's interactive menus (Authoring) that's in such sharp decline that major companies have no economic motive to continue R&D and QA (Quality Assurance testing).

[Nigel Barker]

Many years ago it was possible to buy Encore as a standalone product but it got rolled into a bundle with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 & all subsequent versions have only been available bundled which was a shame as there are few decent Blu-ray authoring packages available for the Mac.

[Pete Bauer]

Craig, I get your points about the direction of the market and actually agree that's where we are heading. However, we differ on the timing of Adobe stopping development on Encore.

My opinion remains that the downgrading of disc authoring capability (eg end of Encore development) was too soon and too abrupt. Disc authoring is too fundamental a capability to toss to the curb so soon. Maybe in a couple years we'll be there, but not yet...

They create dozens of new features with every major release, and continue to support many features that only a tiny fraction customers regularly use. It cannot possibly be beyond Adobe's ability to tweak existing software to maintain existing features as the versions increment.

If Adobe had done nothing more than stay feature-neutral with an Encore CC release, I'd be perfectly happy. They're doing so much else right that it baffles me how a bad decision like this gets made.

So for those who don't care about disc authoring, you're happy. For those of us who do, let Adobe know your wishes:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform...&promoid=EWQQL

[Gabe Strong]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

I have a hunch, if you looked at the current marked and compared the exponential growth of tablet sales compared to the sales of Blu-ray players, the expanding market of SmartTV, Roku, AppleTV sales as well, the numbers will show the market direction. It shows where the consumer is headed. It shows where business to consumer and business to business marketing is headed. The growth numbers in those markets compared to interactive menu driven disc (no one is ending the ability to create optical disc based "screeners" or even putting files on optical disc to deliver a physical medium) are concretely visible to Adobe as it was to Apple preceding them.

Chapter markers are here to stay. The ability to have separate videos whether download or on disc are certainly still here. Physical medium delivery is not gone. Optical discs are still here. It's interactive menus (Authoring) that's in such sharp decline that major companies have no economic motive to continue R&D and QA (Quality Assurance testing).

I have no doubt that the consumer market is headed this way. In a funny aside, I bought a Blu Ray
player, and it streams from every streaming service you can imagine, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime,
Crackle, YouTube, all of them. But my clients are often businesses and they don't seem to be in the
same place as consumers in my experience. I hope they get there but not holding my breath on it.
Encore CS6 works pretty well for my needs though. And it gives me a way to make fully authored
Blu Rays on my Mac, I'm pretty happy with it honestly.

[Ron Evans]

Originally Posted by Mike Beckett

Plus it only seems to do CDs!

Sony have this: DVD Architect Studio 5.0 Overview

But at £25 I'm not sure if it is fully-featured enough for me (i.e. full control over menu building). One will investigate later on.

I'm happy if good ol' buggy Encore remains an option and is still accessible from the CC download for now though.

DVD Architect will do CD, DVD and Bluray and unlike Encore it has audio waveforms to make it easier to set chapter markers. I use the full Pro version DVD Architect 5.2 or 6.0 that comes with Vegas Pro but I think there are not too many differences to the consumer version of DVD Architect 5.0. I use DVD Architect over Encore most of the time. I find creating menus easier in DVD Architect than in Encore.

Ron Evans

[Mike Beckett]

Ron, my point was that the product that Nigel linked to was CD only, I linked to the correct DVD Architect software.

I had a quick play and it seems OK, time will tell.

[Ron Evans]

Yes there is a CD Architect 5.2 too that is a Red Book CD authoring application.

Ron Evans

[Brian Drysdale]

Originally Posted by Mike Beckett

Plus it only seems to do CDs!

Sony have this: DVD Architect Studio 5.0 Overview

Sorry didn't notice the CD, I assumed they were all DVD.

[John Richard]

A HUGE part of our little shop biz involves producing DVD's/BR for industrial/commercial/institutional companies.

Their salesmen carry a DVD (even CD still) that they pop into clients computers and run a quickie presentation.

Safety and process training use these as well.

It may not be sexy, but it pays the bills and communicates well.

We tried thumbdrives but many companies have gotten smart and will not allow such 2 way devices onto their networks for fear of viruses and theft.

I completely agree with Pete Bauer on this one - as much as folks are trying to kill of optical for some reason, this medium is definitely NOT dead and will not be for some time.

And Dynamic Link from Premiere to Encore has worked well for us - till NOW!!! It allowed us to tweak away to the client's changes and needs so quickly.

ADOBE - don't blow it please.

[Craig Seeman]

Originally Posted by John Richard

A HUGE part of our little shop biz involves producing DVD's/BR for industrial/commercial/institutional companies.

Their salesmen carry a DVD (even CD still) that they pop into clients computers and run a quickie presentation.

Safety and process training use these as well.

The unreliability of DVD compatibility was always a challenge. Not fun when the sales person's DVD doesn't play in their potential customer's DVD player.

Honestly I can't speak for other parts of the world but everyone I know in any kind of sales position has either or both a smartphone and a tablet. Keeping the file on that and a dock to HDMI adaptor means they can play it in either 720 or 1080 on the HDTV. Granted if they don't have an HDTV and block any kind of files transfer (as you mention with thumb drives), that would be an issue.

As far as safety and training, maybe I'm interpreting it differently but I recently had a client who needed safety training with DVD delivery. After talking to them I find out there were potential issues with employees not being able to attend the training in which the DVD would be played. There were also concerns about retention when it was needed in the work environment. I asked how many of their employees carried smartphones on site. While not everyone had them, the supervisors did and a good number of employees.

The conclusion was that smartphone delivery would ensure access to the information on site for anyone who might forget aspects of the safety training. The presentations with the gathering of employees also didn't need a DVD. They had laptops and HDTV at those locations. Rather than an uprezed DVD they would playback the file from laptop to HDTV. They could distribute the file to anyone who couldn't make. No worries about needing extra copies either in that case. The result was a lower cost to them, better quality presentation in HD, file delivery to ensure on site information retention with files on smartphones.

BTW, even such DVD does not need to be an authored disc. While I can't speak for Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X allows export to DVD and Blu-ray with simple menus. There's no need for an authoring program.

I'll say again, it's not that optical disc is dead, it's the need for authoring that's going away. There's a score of programs that can give you a DVD or Blu-ray with simple functional menus and chapter markers.

[Dan Burnap]

When my clients decide they no longer want disc copies I'll stop delivering them, not when Adobe decides.

I constantly use Dynamic link to create DVDs and Blu-rays from the same project. With Cs6 I found it reliable and saved huge amounts of time and available disk space by not having to render out a master to be encoded into DVD \ BR formats.

As an owner of CS6 I was slowly coming around to the fact I will inevitably jump onto CC but this is an even bigger reason not to now. Less functionality is unacceptable to me.

[Benjamin Maas]

Just another reason why I won't be going to CC from CS6. First there is the aspect of a business be held hostage by its license and now this...

Encore has been a source of much frustration for me as it seems like every major version has fixed the huge bug in the last one, but introduced an equally bad new bug. The list for me has been huge... I work in classical and acoustic music and while a lot of my clients want online delivery of files for YouTube and such, there are a huge number of folks that I work for who are complete technical neophytes. They want a disc that they can play in a player on their TV. Sometimes it is a DVD, sometimes, it is a Blu-ray.

No software is completely unable to be replaced. This is especially true in media- audio and video. I have no issue looking elsewhere for my software.

--Ben

[Greg Clark]

I wrote to Adobe complaining about not including Encore with CC. Their answer was you can always use Encore for CS6 with CC. What a cop out and in my opinion a big mistake.