Why use Encore if Premier Pro will make a DVD?
 

I'm trying to eliminate having to use Adobe Encore. Is there any specific reason to use Encore in your opinion rather than just using Adobe Premier Pro 2.0 to make your MASTER DVD?

Hi Ricky,

If all you need is a quick DVD with a basic templated menu, or no menu at all (put the disc in and it plays), Premiere is great and is all you need. If you need to customize the menus, set up special circumstance things, you'll need Encore for that.

Does this help? :)

Eric

Thanks. Well I guess I really want to know if I'm going to get a better quality MASTER from using Encore vs. PP 2.0?

Are both programs using the same internal devices for encoding my master?

What are you referring to as a "Master."

Mike

I'm talking about making a MASTER DVD, like the one I send to the replicator.

That's what I thought. If you are thinking of a MASTER as in the Encore menu, that is sent to a professional replicator, that is an export to a DLT (Digital Linear Tape) machine, not a DVD disk. It is used to send to a replicator for putting copyright protection and such on your replicated disks.

MASTER's can only be exported form Encore and to a DLT machine. If you want to send your finished project to a replicator in any other form, call them to see what they require.

If you don't care about copyright protection and just want someone to make you a bunch of copies of a disk that you already have, that's different.

What do you have and how long etc.. Maybe we can help you out.

Mike

Thanks. Well we litterally sell thousands of our instructional DVDs and I'm at the point where I want to step our game up.

We're creating a $499.95 training program that will be licensed to beauty schools around the world and I want the best picture quality possible. Here is our current workflow:

1. Film with Sony A1U in HDV 60i mode

2. Firewire from Mini DV to Adobe PP 2.0

3. Edit in Adobe PP 2.0

4. Record audio and lay Dolby Digital 5.1 audio in timeline (We have a SurCod Audio Encoder that encodes all our audio to legit AC3. files with Dolby Digital Standards)

5. Export everything in one timeline via Adobe PP using MPEG Layer II

6. Take the MPEG Layer II and bring it into DVD Lab Pro to burn.

You can see a sample of our work here:
http://www.braidsbybreslin.com/weave-preview.html


But after studying for hours, I feel we can produce MUCH better DVD's!

Here's how I'm thinking of changing our workflow.

1. Film with Sony A1U in HDV 60i mode

2. Firewire from Mini DV to Adobe PP 2.0

3. Edit in Adobe PP 2.0

4. Record audio and lay Dolby Digital 5.1 audio in timeline (We have a SurCod Audio Encoder that encodes all our audio to legit AC3. files with Dolby Digital Standards)

HERE'S WHERE WE CHANGE:

5. CHANGE THE ENCODING PROCESS. Export HDV source footage to MPEG Layer II file via Cinema Craft http://www.cinemacraft.com/eng/sp.html ($1,995.00)

6. Export audio file via SurCode for Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoder for legit AC3. file.

7. Take these 2 source files (WHICH SHOULD LOOK MUCH BETTER) and burn via Adobe Encore for final DVD.

Whatchu think?

I can't help with the DLT and that stuff, but I'm wondering why you're doing training videos in 5.1? Is your audience using 5.1 systems for playback? Do you 6 discreet channels of audio in your production through the mixdown process or are you splitting 2.0 into 5.1? If you use 2.0 audio, you can give the audio better sound quality AND give more bandwidth to the video track. Just a thought.

Ricky,

OK, I would say that the quality of your video looks pretty good right now, but I don't know what it looks like at full DVD resolution. Don't know about the http://www.cinemacraft.com/eng/sp.html , but I would think that your HDV video from the AU1, that is HDV isn't it, would be fine down ressed (sp) to SD, without any other software.

As far as Dolby 5.1, that is surround sound five channel and I doubt you will need that at all. Capturing good audio with the best mikes and equipment you have is the most important thing. Just keep it clean and rich, with the proper volume. I would doubt that even one of your potential client's/purchaser's would ever watch your DVD in an environment with 5.1 digital theater sound, (five speakers). Good mono or stereo would be just fine.

I would make the best movie you can, use really nice and interactive
DVD menu's and such, allowing people to move around the DVD at will so they control their learning experience. You can burn your own DVD then have that duplicated, or buy duplicating machines for a very reasonable cost. You yourself can make hundreds of copies per day, at a reasonable cost.

If you wish to have another make your copies, that's fine too. Most will be able to make them from your DVD, but they will not have any copyright protection. For that they have to be from DLT master. Some may take a MiniDV tape of your finished project.

For regular DVD's, you can get them replicated for very low prices, or so they seem to me, but check with them for the format they require. For smaller amounts, like yours, they will just burn them to "DVD's. For really large amounts, hundreds of thousands, not like yours, they will be pressed from a master disk.

Sorry to be so long winded. To the point----Make the video with the best lighting, sound, enjoyable and entertaining content that you can, maybe hire a graphics artist to do covers and such, then have them replicated. Remember that shooting in HDV is fine but you will be selling them in regular SD or DV. You don't want to do HD DVD or Blu-ray, as your customers will not need that and won't have th players to play them on.

Good luck---Mike

You can use a DVD+/-R as a Master disc too. I did it with DiscMakers last year with no problem. They can replicate (burn) or duplicate (press) them with either burned discs. I believe you can set protection bits when you burn DVD's yourself too, to prevent most people from copying them.

Hey Eric, thanks for the post. Here's how we do our audio. In Sony Sound Forge 9.0 they allow you with the new version to record directly to 6 channels using 5.1 surround. So it's great!

So my wife will record using a Rode NT1 mic that goes thru our TASCAM US-122 Pre-Amp straight to SF 9.0. We'll save the .Wav file and bring it into Premeir Pro 2.0.

In Premeire Pro 2.0 it recognizes are source 5.1 wav files from Sound Fourge as 6 seperate audio files and it sounds great.

When then make all of our levels good, etc and export using the SurCode Audio Encoder for Dolby Digital 5.1.

Make sense?

Oh yea, we burn these by the thousands, we have have 30,000 in storage right now. We pay .94 per disk. They come shrink wrapped, etc. We do bar codes, ISBN numbers, the works!

We give our replicator -R's.

In a word, no. :)

Because it's a mono microphone, it's only giving you 1 channel of audio. You can pan it to any of the 5 channels, or to all, but it's 1 channel nonetheless.

Most people do not have 5.1 channel surround systems. It's useful if you're going for a certain effect, such as immersing your viewers in an environment. If you're in machine room, you could capture 4 channels of surround sound (front left and right, rear left and right) and split those to the those speakers. Then put your NT-1 signal into the center channel for dialogue. But putting dialogue into all 5 speakers will just sound weird to most people. On Surround systems, the center channel is 99% of the time the only place dialogue resides. On a 2.0 (stereo) system, dialogue is panned to the center (mono) with possibly stereo soundtrack/ambient sound.

Unless you're using a 4, 5 or 5.1 channel microphone setup, or spending a lot of time with environment mixing on a 5.1 channel editing system, you won't be using 5.1 sound. Just do it in stereo. You'll also save hard drive space as you'll be using 2 wave files, or maybe just one because your mic is a mono source), vs 6 wave files.

Here's what I would do:
* Record into the camera with the mic, as long as your signal path is clean, since you have one of the cleanest mics *ever* there ;)
* Capture into Premiere
* Add music in stereo on another track
* Export stereo audio as PCM for the best audio quality.

This is much simpler and gives you better sound quality.

The more channels you add, the more the audio is compressed to allow the bandwidth of reading more audio tracks off the disc at once.

You could do 2.0 channel AC-3 but that's still compressed. PCM is not, it's Wave quality (uncompressed). AC-3 is similar to MP3, it alters your audio to use less bandwidth. If your picture quality doesn't look so nice, you can do 2.0 AC-3 to give more bandwidth to it, but it should be fine really..

Are you sure about the 5.1 surround not being legit? From what I understand, you're saying that our MONO audio file we record is basically being shared to 6 different speakers making it "less" effective in a sense.

My replicator REQUIRES AC3 files so that's why I bought the 300$ AC3 Encoder plug in from SurCode. So I could always take my sterio file and export it using the same program, no biggie.

But I have to admit, it's a freakin' drag dealing with the 6 wav files and making the levels all good, etc.

But on the other hand, it doesn't seem like it's really hurting anything by going the Dolby Digital route, we've burned a master and listened and it sounds great...

I'm *positive*. Unless you're sending different things to the various channels, you're making a 5.1 channel *mono* recording.

If they require it, just give them 2.0 AC-3, which is stereo with no subwoofer (LFE) channel. You can also do 1.0 AC-3, but I would use stereo music tracks.

Definitely ditch the 6 track stuff, you're just wasting space and cpu power. It will sound fine either way. You would hear more of a difference between AC-3 and PCM if you had for example, a very nice symphonic recording, on a nice speaker system, in a nice listening environment. Speech can sound pretty good on AM radio, so it'll sound fine either way with this. :)

So the final verdict is 2.0 AC-3, microphone panned center, music in stereo. :)

And for leveling your signal, use a compressor on your speech, and stay away from any Normalizing. Just raise the clip levels if necessary. Normalizing just makes your peaks as loud as they can be and raises everything else up below that, but doesn't really smooth out and match your levels the way a Compressor will.

Well you just changed my operation :-), thanks!

So FROM NOW ON, I'm going to record in regular sterio, 2 tracks, wav files.

And it's funny you mention normalizing. We just recorded and had her stay at about -8db and didn't do anything and they sounded great without normalizing!

My DVD replicator requires AC3 so the little 300$ SurCode AC3 Dolby Digital Encoder plug in will have to stay.

Will it still be "Dolby Digital" with just 2 channels?

You can record just mono with your mono microphone. You'll use half the space for your files for that mic, and a slight amount of processing power as well.

Yeah normalizing is just a waste of processing power. For example, if somone ruffles their clothing, coughs, sighs, a phone rings, etc. Anything louder than their actual speech (even by 2dB), your audio will be 2dB quieter than it *could* be, because of one little loud section. Compression will keep the little sound under control, and then the output gain of the compressor will bring the entire track up. A compressor is a good idea on speech anyway, to keep the quieter words closer to the volume of the louder words, and keep it all above your music bed, ambient sound, etc. :)

So yes, you'll need the $300 app to do this anyway, unless you're going with Encore, so you haven't lost out on anything, just saved some time and space and power with this thread. ;)

FWIW, Encore DVD includes a stereo Dolby Digital encoder.

Right, but I believe he wants to avoid Encore and do it all from Premiere. And he spent $300.. :)

I also believe you get one or two uses before you have to pay for Dolby.

Mike

So back to the original question if ya don't mind. I talked to some people on the phone today about MPEG2 encoding and they say Adobe's suck. So I was thinking of exporting as a Microsoft DV AVI file and then compressing using a fancier MPEG2 encoder.

Would that really matter or if you were me, would you just keep it simple and export EVERYTHING via PP 2.0 on one MPEGII file and call it a day?

Yea, you get three, but supposedly the SurCode treats your audio way better in the encoding process plus you can say it's "Dolby Digital" officially as Minnentonka, the company who sells it, jumped thru all the hoops for Dolby already.

That's what I heard... Could be wrong though.

The video encoding isn't good either? Hmm. I don't know for sure. Perhaps speed-wise the transcoding could be faster in Encore. I'm not sure about quality though.

It's Dolby Digitally 'officially' if it's stored in that format. Like saving a file as an MP3 with 10 different MP3 encoders.. Which one is the MP3 file? They all are, whether the encoder was free, bundled, or 10 gajillion dollars.. :)

As I had/have said before, the quality of your content, sound, interface, and packaging will have much more to do with your success than fancy encoders.

M

Personally, I like to export from an audio or video app as rendered file (either avi or wav), and then keep that file somewhere. I then have a real 'master' file that I can further process/convert to other formats, without having to wait for the rendering process all over again if I decide that VBR doesn't look as good as CBR (random example here). I just have to convert the avi another time (transcoding), without rerendering..

Same with multitrack audio recording/mixing. I always export to a 24 bit wave file and then convert than to an mp3, because if I need a lower or higher quality mp3 later, I don't need to mixdown (render) the whole song again, I just need to convert to another format, which is quick, especially with Sound Forge.

Cool, that actually makes me feel better because our DVDs look great, very crisp, audio sounds good, etc. I think I'm just trying to hard to make it "Perfect".

So to make this simple (Thanks to ya'll :-)), I'm goin to stick with just doing 2 simple audio tracks, doing the AC3 thing, and just encoding using the encoder within Premier. So screw it, I'll just export it all out of Premier using their internal one and call it a day. This is about as simple as you can get! Thanks fellaz!

I've never recorded in anything other than 16 bit, 48 Khz for my DVDs. Any reason to ever to 24 bit?

Yup, better audio fidelity for processing. If you run a compressor, effects, eq, volume fades, etc, etc.. You'll get better fidelity. It may or may not be perceptible, but the more processing you do, the more you want the extra math in there for detail.

It's the same thing as image processing in Photoshop or any other graphics app. The more colors you have available (16 bit = 65,536, 24 bit = 16,777,216), the smoother your fades will be in your images, the better the colors will blend, etc. Those numbers are also the same values for # of volume levels from 0 volume to full volume with audio. More levels will give you more accurate audio when blending things, eq'ing, etc. It also lowers your noise floor. These things are subjective though. You won't hear a 16 bit audio clip and say 'that doesn't have enough level variations in it!'.. But the 24 bit version may sound better. The same thing applies to samplerate (48k, 96k, etc).. It's like having 48 frames/second like IMAX, vs 24 frames/sec for regular film. The 24 doesn't look *bad*, but the 48 is smoother on movement, has more detail during the movement, etc. Sampling your audio 96,000 times/second will have more detail than 48,000 times/second. Plus you get cleaner high frequencies from harmonics and other things, at frequencies that are still below 20,000Hz which are audible.. They're affected by frequencies above human hearing. Also, due to the Nyquist theorem, digital audio only plays back at half the frequency of the sample rate. so 48kHz really comes back at 24kHz.. This is all far more complicated than you care to know about, but the point is, the higher the numbers, the more detail in your audio or video.

Like a newspaper photo versus a magazine photo versus a super glossy magazine photo. They're all photos, they all look fine. But one of them looks damn fine, assuming they used a nice camera, nice processing, and nice printing on nice paper. :)

Well, that's what I thought initially. But I noticed his revised DVD authoring workflow includes Encore for burning the DVD, in place of DVD Lab Pro.

The SurCode for Dolby Digital Pro Encoder - which allows up to 5.1 channel encodes - that Adobe bundles with Premiere Pro allows three trial uses. For any encodes beyond that limit you can activate the plugin for $300.

On the other hand, the stereo Dolby Digital encoder included with Encore does not have to be purchased. It allows unlimited encodes. You don't get all the options the SurCode encoder provides, but if your needs extend only to stereo encoding and setting the bitrate, it works fine.

Well If I export my audio and video via Adobe PP 2.0 I'll only need to use Encore or DVD Lab Pro to Author the DVD.

From my understanding, PP 2.0 and Encore have the exact same MainConcept MPEG2 encoder so there's no point NOT to export via PP 2.0.

The original question still doesn't seem to have been fully answered.

FWIW, my impression from other threads is: a) Encore and PPro are using the same encoder, b) the PPro1 and 2 versions weren't that great, and c) the CS3 version of the encoder has indeed improved, at least in relation to the HDV to SD Mpeg2 workflow.

(Though I wonder if Point c is more to do with resizing quality than encoding quality?)

So do you think they are using a more updated/better version of PP 2.0 in the CS3 version for the MainConcept Encoder?

Also, I keep hearing about the resizing issue. We simply choose are sizes with PP 2.0, is there a better way?

There was a thread in the last day or two where several users reported improved HDV to SD encoding quality - so yes it seems something has changed.

As an earlier poster said, I would suggest the main reason to chose between Encore vs. PPro DVD authoring would be whether you want sophisticated vs. plain vanilla menuing.

True, except that Encore can automatically adjust encoding settings to fit source material onto a DVD at the highest possible quality.

Also, the MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder only handles video. The audio is handled separately with other encoders. Whether you use the SurCode AC3 encoder in Premiere or the AC3 encoder in Encore, it doesn't much matter from a time standpoint.

I'm a little confused, so in your opinion, what's the best "workflow" for my situation?

I'm doing everything in PP 2.0 now and making my master DVD in DVD Lab Pro. Your saying to use Encore to encode instead of PP 2.0?

So are you saying to just export to Microsoft DV AVI from PP 2.0 and do my Audio seperately using my SurCode plugin and bring both of those files into Adobe Encore and let encore encode my DVD?

My best results in PP 2.0 have been to export as an uncompressed AVI with DVD standard res and frame rate. Then, encode to DVD in Encore.

Gotcha! But you would think that wouldn't be the case because your adding an extra step in the compression process right?

So basically people who buy Cinema Craft or Procoder will export Microsoft DV AVI and use those more expensive programs to convert to MPG2?

So from what I'm reading, the real degradation comes when our HDV footage is converted to MPG2, not AVI.

The issue happen when you apply multiple codecs to a file. When you're capturing footage it's already been put to tape using the HDV codec. Now from there, in my opinion, I want to limit the amount of other codecs used in handling that footage. The only other codecs that handled HDV well are ones like Cineform.

So, when I'm done with my edit. I export an uncompressed AVI file, not the DV because that's another codec. If you're going to DVD I export the file with DVD settings (720x480, 29.97). I have found letting Premier handle the transcoding and Encore doing the encoding creates better results.

Okay, so is Uncompressed AVI NOT a codec and NOT degrading our files at all? Because if this is the case, you can always export it using UNCOMPRESSED AVI and let the better programs convert to MPEGII and simply make your master.

Our all around DVD's should look much better using this format.