Encore looks and works just like Premiere, so there’s little learning curve.

Say hello to Premiere’s new best friend. Adobe Encore comes with Premiere Pro (which is also sold as part of the Adobe CS3 Production Premium suite and the CS3 Master Collection), but it’s by no means a no-frills DVD authoring application tossed in the box. Encore is a full-fledged DVD authoring app that can handle many pro-level projects, and it beats Apple’s DVD Studio Pro in a few key departments.

Encore is especially good at creating menus. As you might expect from an Adobe product, Encore can import documents created in Photoshop, and it recognizes image layers and layer groups. If you change the original document in Photoshop, the changes are automatically reflected in your DVD project. Encore also has a strong complement of Photoshop-like tools built in, so you can import images, place custom buttons and text, and then scale and rotate them as needed. Since new menus are created in the Photoshop format, you can even bring them into Photoshop for more advanced tweaking. Likewise, you can send static menus straight to After Effects and then animate the individual elements.

Creating tracks is easy. Just drag and drop multiple video and audio clips to a familiar timeline (you can encode them beforehand or let Encore do it) and then lay down chapter and compression markers, or just import markers already set in Premiere. You can type out and format your own subtitles directly over video (a great touch), or import text from a script. The capable slideshow editor lets you put together quick presentations of still pictures, add narration and music, apply and time transitions, and more.

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