video editing

I use & love many Adobe products, especially Photoshop. But Encore 1.01 is by far the worst quality Adobe software I've ever seen. I find it almost impossible to finish a project, at some point it will eventually hang opening the project file and my work is lost. Also there are many obvious & "dumb" bugs which are really annoying, problems with transcoding & video import etc. It's as if nobody even tried to build a few DVDs with this before they released it.

To give you an idea, I had a dollar for every time this has hung and I've had to kill it from Task Manager, I'd have paid for the software by now (i.e. hundreds of times).

The nice feature is integration with photoshop, but that is not enough to compensate for the terrible software quality. For a product at this price point it's criminal, and very unlike Adobe.

I completed one project with this and then gave up using it. I'm hoping 1.5 is better quality, I don't care if they add ANY new features I just want them to fix the bugs!

This is a buggy product.

I tried to create a DVD with menus and subtitles. The menus worked fine. But when I added some subtitles, Encore started to crash with "Out of Memory" error.

When it crashed, not only did it corrupt the current project, it somehow corrupted an earlier saved project as well. Perhaps it was already corrupt but did not manifest itself until later.

I then tried adding subtitles on another computer with more memory (512MB), but it crashed just the same.

I checked the support forum at Adobe and realized that I'm not alone on this issue.

Eventually I resorted to using a freeware to create subtitles and then import them into Encore. But eventually I ran into another error: "disc in inconsistent state" while building the DVD. Fortunately, someone on the Adobe support forum pointed out a workaround.

This review applies to version 1.0.1.

Version 1.5 has just been announced.

Unfortunately I have to disagree with any positive review of this product. I've been using trial versions of several "prosumer" class DVD authoring packages before deciding on a final buy, and this product stands out as the worst of them all by far.

When used on a Dell dual P4 2.6GHz Xeon workstation with 2GB of RAM (not your average home PC by a long shot!) the product sort of kept up with doing some very simple editing on VOB files imported from a DVD produced by a set-top DVD recorder. However, I found the product difficult to use - if you're not an Adobe afficionado (and I'll admit I'm not), rather stay away. The kicker was trying to dome some simple editing on a new Dell 8300 Dimension desktop (3GHz P4, 512MB RAM, high performance video card) - just forget it! The performance is unbelievably poor. The audio got out of sync by several minutes.

By comparison, Ulead's DVD Workshop 2 works very well on the same computers, and for me had a more functional and intuitive user interface - maybe without some of the more obscure features of Encore, but good enough for what I want to do.

Bottom line: on paper this product seems to offer most of the features missing from the cheap "home video" DVD authoring offerings available today, but you'd better have VERY sophisticated computer hardware and a lot of time to fiddle around with it. For the life of me I cannot figure out who Adobe's real target audience for this piece of software is. Not recommended.