Blu-ray DVD authoring with Adobe Encore

Adobe's Dave Helmly of DAV's TechTable has a tutorial on the basics of Blu-ray DVD authoring with Adobe Encore, which is embedded below.

He previously covered Blu-ray Playback Problems on his blog. There's also an Adobe guide on Authoring Blu-ray Discs with Adobe Encore in an Apple Final Cut Workflow and Ken Stone's Burn Blu-ray playable discs on a Mac SuperDrive that shows you how to burn high definition video onto standard DVD-R discs that playback in a Blu-ray player.

Motion Menus, AE, & Encore

The aptly named Precomposed Blog sells Motion Menus and textures for After Effects and Encore DVD, but also shares some hard-won lessons in using Encore, as well as a few free tutorials for AE.

Encore's tie-ins with Photoshop and AE are good, but the app can be enervating. Whatever you do, don't save after getting a "General Error." The Precomposed Blog lists some of the ways avoid running into some problems in Encore.

Import Premiere sequences in Encore

When working in Premiere Pro and sending a sequence to Encore with Dynamic Link, you are asked to create a new project in Encore each time. That's a limitation, but you do have better access from Encore.

Once you're in Encore, you can import any number of Premiere sequences from the menu File >Adobe Dynamic Link >Import Premiere Pro Sequence. Once in the import dialog box you can navigate to a Premiere project and see a list of sequences inside the project. You can make a multiple selection of sequences, or access the dialog box again later to import from any Premiere project.

This is a nice new feature, but the big advantage for a modest app like Encore is that its menus are Photoshop files, so they can be easily edited anytime, or sent elsewhere for revision. Plus you can work seamlessly with After Effects to make motion menus. Here's an AdobeTV video on some of benefits of working between AE, Premiere, and Encore (fullscreen at Adobe):

Open Encore DVD projects cross platform

As you may know, Adobe Encore DVD projects are officially not cross platform.

But, from the aether, there's an unsupported trick to open a Win/Mac project in OS X /Windows. If you delete the file “ProjectMedia.acx” from the project folder before opening the project it'll open, but then you'll need to locate asset files and transcode all over again.

Encore CS3 and Blu-ray on the MacPro

Dave's Tech Table has some updated info on Working with Adobe Encore CS3 and Blu-ray, especially concerning using the 2 ODD onboard SATA ports on a MacPro.

Encore CS3 and Blu-ray on new Adobe blog

Dave Helmly, an Business Development Manager, has published his first entry on his blog, DAV's TechTable. According to The Genesis Project, Dave's video blog will be focusing on hardware and technology. This time out, there's an in-depth discussion on Working with Encore CS3 and Blu-ray.