I am sure a couple of people who own Encore 1.0 are going to look at this article wondering if they should upgrade to 1.5. Of course the good people at Adobe will say “YES, YOU SHOULD! IT’S WAY BETTER!” Can you blame them? They are, after all, in the business of selling software. My answer to the upgrade question is: “Depends.” (Yes, I know that helps you so much.) The short answer is: yes, it is better than 1.0, as a DVD author, I needed the additional power.

The rest of this article is the long answer. Honestly I am in the habit of purchasing full step revisions. I don’t go for the point fives, I like big steps and really noticeable differences. I even will wait two full releases until I upgrade. (There are a few of my peers who laugh that I held onto Win 98 until last year.) But that’s me. If you ask me about Photoshop 7.0 versus CS, I would say wait for the next version. (However, I think the Pixel Aspect Ratio adjustment in CS is really handy for DVD’s.) With Encore I believe there is a better case for making the 1.5 upgrade.

Let’s face facts, Encore 1.0 was a first generation program. Every first attempt has mistakes and some of those mistakes don’t come out in beta. If you look at what the Encore Team did, it’s an ambitious first swing. The 1.5 version is more stable than its predecessor. Some of the small issues in the subtitler have been ironed out and the program handles novel situations with more grace. After playing with the 1.5 beta for the last 4 months on about 5 different computers, I have to say it’s ready to play.

However, upgrades are about FEATURES, the bells and whistles. So let’s look at a few of the biggies. If you look at a couple of them and say “Ooh, I need that,” then get the upgrade. Yet if you say, “um well that seems Okay,” then wait until 2.0. After all, you’ll get all of these upgrades plus a whole lot more. (Can’t talk about specifics, but trust me, given Adobe’s track record, 2.0 is going to shatter the status quo of DVD Authoring on ANY platform.)

One of the great things about the Encore concept is the integration with other Adobe products. If you have Encore and Photoshop, but didn’t use the Edit in Photoshop feature, you pretty much missed the boat. Encore’s Menu Editor is great, but it isn’t Photoshop. We’ll talk about this in the next article. Encore 1.5 pushes this integration a bit further by bringing the other big sisters into the fray. The Create After Effects Composition command is godsend for motion menu freaks like me. Encore will take the menu in the Editor, and import it into AE. The AE article in this series will explain why this new feature makes precise motion menu creation so easy. In Premiere you can set markers on AVI clips, and Encore will recognize the positions and set chapter points. Before this only worked with MPEG-2 clips encoded in Premiere!

The Edit Original command is a bit ambiguous. Basically if an asset has a project link it will open the file in the program it was created in. So if you have a Premiere clip in your Encore timeline and need to tweak it, clicking on Edit Original will open Premiere and the project. It’s a very handy feature and another example of how Encore is geared to work with her sister applications.

The biggest new feature is Playlists. If you used Override in 1.0, think of Playlists as Override on steroids. Now if you didn’t use Override it’s okay, you’ll still love Playlists. Basically a playlist allows you to link several timelines together in a particular order. For example, if you had three music videos on three separate timelines you could create a “Play All” Playlist that would play them in order and return to the main menu. Or if you wanted to start all the timelines on the second chapter, you could. (See free tutorial coming soon!) What does this mean to you? Fewer timelines and more control over the presentation of your timelines.