Ok, I have a few (Maybe a lot) questions.
I just got Adobe Encore, and am having some trouble. I've gone through the manual and the website tutorials, but am still a bit lost.

I have adobe photoshop, and adobe premier 6.5, and after effects 5.5, but am currently only using Adobe Photoshop for this DVD.

I have a menu that I made in Photoshop, with 4 buttons, and title at the top saying my company's name, and a separate text saying DEMO DVD.

First of all, how do I program the playback? How do I link things together? In other words, how do I program it so when you click on the button, it goes to that movie, and when done playing, it goes back to the main menu?

Menu Animation - If possible, I would love it if my buttons and titles could all either fade in, or slide in from off screen independently, how do I animate this? Do I do this in something other than Encore? How do I add sounds to the main menu sequence?

YIKES!

I haven't seen much people with Encore experience here. You
might be better off to try it at the Adobe forums....

Let us know if you find any good sources, I'm thinking of purchasing that product due to it's region and security encoding. Supposedly, you can import those Photoshop designs directly and make all the animations you want. But, like you, I have no idea how. I assume it's a click and drag function (like making hyperlinks when creating a web page).

Well I 'm pretty new to DVD authoring but I figured all that out pretty quicky.

When desingning a menu you can right click on any text or picture and convert it to a button. Then right click again anf link it to a timeline. You must make timelines of your video footage first to have something to link to. This is simple to. From the project pane, rick click on the video file and select new timeline then drage the associated audio on to the timeline and add your chapter points...right click on timeline for that also.

As far as what the clip does when it ends, you can change that in the properties tab of that timeline...

Hope this helps out if you haven't figured it out yet

I'm having a problem with the subpictures for the buttons I created. The buttons are highlighted when I mouseover on the preview, but when I burn the DVD and put it on my DVD player, there's no indication for when a button is selected or not, making it a 'hit-or-miss' operation. How do I get the highlighting to show up in a player?

I found a page on the Adobe forums that claims Adobe simply didn't expect people to actually want to have highlighted buttons, so they didn't make the program able to do it. They suggested creating three (or however many buttons you have) seperate menus, each with a different button highlighted, and the other buttons pointing at the other menus and set on auto-activate.

Ok, convoluted and wierd, but I can do it. In fact, I did. Now the buttons glow when selected, and then start in sequence for some reason.

Am I missing something, or has nobody at Adobe actually produced their own DVD before?

Hi gang. I use Encore everyday and am currently working on my certification as a licensed Adobe instructor on Encore.

The number one thing I tell everyone with this program is to keep the book next to you for the first month you use it. I used the book every step of the way for weeks and weeks and still pull it out every now and then.

Corey, your playback questions are all pretty elementary things, spend time in the book and you'll get it down in no time.

As for animated menus, that really requires After Effects as is another level of usage. Get the basics down first.

Originally posted by Lin Tao-ming :
I found a page on the Adobe forums that claims Adobe simply didn't expect people to actually want to have highlighted buttons, so they didn't make the program able to do it. They suggested creating three (or however many buttons you have) seperate menus, each with a different button highlighted, and the other buttons pointing at the other menus and set on auto-activate.

Ok, convoluted and wierd, but I can do it. In fact, I did. Now the buttons glow when selected, and then start in sequence for some reason.

Am I missing something, or has nobody at Adobe actually produced their own DVD before?
Sorry, but this is just flat out incorrect.

Encore has the ability to auto create highlights for buttons within the program and by using Photoshop you can create any kind of highlight you want for any button.

The auto highlights (look up 'subpicture' in the manual) are real easy to turn on. All it takes is checking one box in the properties window and selecting one thing from a drop down menu. (I don't have Encore in front of me, so I can't tell you exactly what to do).

You can then change the color of the highlights to whatever you want.

I create pretty much all of my subpictures (that's what's used for highlights) in Photoshop. You basically have three images for each button. One is for the button when nothing is happening to it, one is for when it's selected, and another for when it's activated.

You can make these highlights be simple color changes of the text, to icons that appear at the side of the text, to anything you want.

Encore is a very powerful program, but there is a learning curve. You've got to understand *why* things happen in Encore and how they've designed the system.

I created the highlights with subpictures using the process you described, and they show up fine in the preview, but not on my DVD player or the players of any of my friends or the ones at work. Can anyone tell me how to make highlights that show up on players and not just in the previews? The highlights show up covering the entire button in a transparent orange on selection, and red on activation in preview. Nothing shows up on the DVD player at all.

The link on the Adobe forums showing the workaround is here: http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@1.vRq9b5a5Zsb.1243001@.2ccedd3c

I've never had that problem at all. And I make a lot of training DVDs that are played on a different DVD player each week.

Did you make the subpictures in Photoshop or Encore?

The subpictures were made with Encore with the "create subpicture" option in the menu. The buttons themselves as well as the menu background were done in Photoshop.

Originally posted by Tao-ming Lin :
The subpictures were made with Encore with the "create subpicture" option in the menu. The buttons themselves as well as the menu background were done in Photoshop.

The only time I use the subpicture auto-create in Encore is with text. Otherwise I create button and the highlights in Photoshop.

The book describes how to build your PSD in Photoshop and how to label the layers correctly so Encore handles the highlights in the right way. It's really pretty easy. At first it's kind of confussing but simply open up a template menu from the library included with Encore into Photoshop and look at how the highlight layers are set up.

In my personal opinion, while you can make good menus in Encore, if you have Photoshop you should be creating everything in there and import it to Encore.

Alex,

Just a heads-up on the regional encoding, I think that like copy protection, you can only use that function if your output is to DLT for glass-master DVDs. I'm pretty sure that you cannot use regional encoding when you burn DVD+/-R discs yourself.

For what it's worth, as a hobbiest, I've been very happy so far with Encore. It does have a steep learning curve even for those of us who have used other Adobe products for a while, but it is powerful.

Everyone,

There is an Encore update on the Adobe site that fixes a number of bugs.

Cheers!

I got Encore a couple of months ago and I'm really dissapointed with it. I use AE, P-Pro, and PhotoS everyday and I figured with Adobe's track record on them that is would be a real triumpth. Have any of you gone on the Adobe Forums for this product? I've never seen such widespread buggy problems with a new app. I've used a large variety of DVD Authoring programs from Sonic solutions, Ulead, and many others and this one from Adobe had the most promise but really missed out in excution. I've gone back and forth with Adobe support trying to get the app to work correctly ( video monitors missing, not able to import AVI, crashes on install, etc etc ) but I finally put a stop to it when they told me to reformat my main drive. I have a brand new computer I just built and every other DVD authoring app works like a dream on it since its top of the line and Encore would just fail me again and again. Finally I had to just shelve it because it was eating into my work time on a lot of video projects I have to produce. I'm sure there are people that have the correct video card, have their setup just to work for this app and I'm happy for them, but for me where time is money I don't have the time to work with buggy software I'll pick it up again when its up to update 3.0 and most of the bugs are out. Good luck people, but sorry I have to give a big thumbs down on Encore.