[Doug Beechwood]

Hello,

Encore again… Aaack 🙂 I don’t think this program deserves an encore performance just a one night showing and then it should close down.

OK – the “missing export file error” again. If you are already working with elementary streams then you should have the right stuff. Encore really prefers ac3 files to Aiff or Wav though. Although -it doesn’t support 5.1 ac3’s .. it downmixes those to standard 2.0.. another issue that baffles adobe tech support.

Is the project HD or Standard?
I gave up trying menus with encore because it doesn’t currently support highlights for buttons in widescreen mode – which is every HD disc. You may be having a problem with missing graphics files in the menus. Remember Menus only work properly with this program in Standard 4×3 mode. Unless Adobe released a secret fix that they haven’t told anyone about.

I ran across several posts about people having bad linking to the menus in encore. Menus made with photoshop apparently work better than encores own menus.

I had the same frustration with a project burning several times, and then loosing the links to the media. For copies I simply bought toast 9 and made an ISO of my Blu-ray disc, and burnt with the $30 blu-ray toast plugin.

Adobe help is actually quite easy to get a hold of. They seem very willing to try and help solve problems – unless they don’t have a solution. They told me I would have to wait until the next release to get menu support for Blu-Ray.

Let me know what you find out. I am curious about the solution.

FYI – for menus I also tried to use Sonic DVD-IT pro HD on a PC. I wasted 2 weeks with that program and was still unable to burn a disc. For now HD menus aren’t part of our workflow.

– db

[Doug Beechwood]

FIXED IT!

After 2 days of searching for similar problems I found it & fixed it.

Encore CS3 wants to work with “Elementary Streams”. It will tolerate Quicktime files, but it doesn’t reference them well when it goes to burn a Blu Ray disc. Basically it seems that Encore has an issue remembering the location and names of files that it has transcoded – even when it has just transcoded them as part of the burn process.

Really Frustrating – as it would work some of the time with some files and not work most of the time.

So – the Fix. It took a while to figure out WTF an “Elementary Stream” was (either an h.264, or M2v for video, and or ac3/aiff(PCM) for audio). In order to get an elementary stream in to Encore I set up a custom compression using compressor (3.0.2). Compressor will let you create an Mpeg-2 encoding template for Blu-Ray( Imagine that). I set up a VBR 2 pass encode with 39Mbit as the high, and 33 Mbit as the low.

Took 10 minutes to process that and an ac3 file from my original (muxed) Quicktime file ( uncompressed 10 Bit 1920×1080 @ 23.976psf). Compressor will auto-detect frame rates, but I found that too spooky, and opted to create settings for 23.98 fps, and interlaced footage.

Upon re-creation and re-import of my assets into Encore I successfully built an auto-play 1080HD 24P Blu-Ray disc! Ac3 audio seems to give less problems than aiff audio so far.

..so much for beta testing this $1500 piece of not ready for prime-time Macro-Dobe SH**%.
Maybe it will work someday with out all of the rocket science in footage preparation. Till then I’ll stock with DVDSP for DVD’s, and hope that not so many clients want Blu-Ray.

FYI – My setup: 8 core Intel Mac(1st Gen), 5 GB Ram, 10.5.2, CS3 Master Suite + FCP Studio 2. Most footage from HDCAM- ProresHQ + Uncompressed.

[Doug Beechwood]

I am getting the same missing export error. The only way to fix is to scrap the whole project -rebuild and hope that encore burns a disc.

No Rhyme – No reason.

Help!!