Larry Applegate
Forum Replies Created
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You might even consider the last 15″ Macbook Pro that had an eSata slot, even if you don’t need it at first. You can probably find one on eBay from reputable dealers. I would rather have one of those than a 13″, which i had, but the screen is just so small.
I have a Sonnet Tempo Pro eSata card and an older FirmTek 2-drive enclosure, and it works perfectly on my MacBookPro 17″ on both OS X and Windows 7.
The problem with USB is that it is unreliable. The problem with FireWire is that there is only one controller, so it will be a bottleneck if you ever daisy chain a 2nd drive, or hook up a camera. If you ever want to edit uncompressed, a single drive is not fast enough, you need a Raid 0 which I can do with my enclosure. And still have full speed on a firewire drive.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
I have been trying for two years to get Adobe to provide any support or bug fixes for Encore. Including personal meetings with high-level executives and the India development team at NAB in April. Promises, but no results. Key people leaving Adobe. No internal knowledge or testing of real-life Blu-ray authoring with Encore. No way for the small Encore India team to get their fixes into the CS5 releases.
A fix which I documented and explained to the India team last March, which they implemented in a test build and showed me at NAB in April, still has not made it into any Encore release.
True, Encore is very low on the CS5 totem pole. The CS5 release was already in the works and it was too late to include this fix. But 7 months later, and never another Encore release? No fixes for the many bugs in Encore CS4 over its life?
At least Apple was honest enough not to promise anything for Blu-ray when they knew that trying to cobble a Blu-ray solution onto DVD Studio Pro was never going to work.
I was an Adobe employee for 3 years after they bought our previous company. They had lots of very smart programmers and scientists. But I fear they have lost their way with offshore development, not because the offshore people are not smart, but because there is a complete management disconnect for testing and bug fixing.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Hi James,
The short answer is that you can’t use a subtitle menu successfully until Adobe does an Encore update which was working in a special build that I saw at NAB but never made it info a formal release.
The problem is that the generated Blu-ray instructions for selecting the subtitle (and audio) tracks is just plain wrong. The way it was supposed to work is that a GPR (general purpose register) was supposed to retain the selected value, but among other things the code always immediately clears the register after saving the correct value.
There was a similar but different problem in CS4 and we devised a solution with our BluStreak Premaster application, by post-processing the Encore build folder prior to burning or replication.
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/
However to fix the CS5 code would require re-multiplexing of the menus, at which point we gave up, since we don’t have a Blu-ray multiplexer. Don’t consider going back to CS4, however, since in most other respects the CS5 navigation is far superior.
So your best bet is to ping on Adobe and ask them, when are you going to release this fix?
Then, unfortunately, even after the fix, you are trying to do two things with one interface: use a highlight to show which button is selected, meaning which button will activate when you press Enter, and trying to use the same highlight to show which button indicates the current stream number. Yes, if there was scripting capability, you could select the appropriate button when the menu pops up.
In professional authoring, what the author does is use “button groups”. A button group is a collection of images for different states of the same button, separate from any highlighting for selection and activation. The button group will only show the enabled image, and the other images will all be disabled by scripting.
Blu-ray allows completely different images and palettes, so the possibilities are endless, and it is simple enough to put a check mark or some other means to indicate which is the currently selected stream, even while navigating and deciding which buttons to select and activate.
The author who first asked us for this feature for CS4 actually accomplished it on a normal (not popup) menu, by having two versions of the entire menu, for just two audio choices. And luckily he didn’t have subtitles, the possible combinations grow very quickly.
Resume applies only to normal menus, not popups. There is actually a Popup-off command, and Encore includes it, but forgot to implement it. Luckily most players will close the popup when you hit the popup button a second time.
With these bugs, the only way to properly set audio and subtitle tracks is with the remote functions themselves, or by using set stream and link directly to the main video from a normal menu.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
Rivergate Software, Inc. -
I agree with Eric that DoStudio for PC is a step up from Encore, but with multi-page popup menus it has come a long way with CS5. And BluStreak Premaster has been creating replicated discs from Encore projects for well over a year now, at a reasonable cost for our software.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
John,
No there is not, I believe that Adobe did the patch for Macintosh only, as a test. There was talk of a point-release for both platforms at the time, but I did not see any mention of Encore in the Premiere point-release.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Yes, Ryan, afaik it works fine for DVD. I apologize for jumping the gun.
Use “Specify Link” from the Link popup for the button, choose the stream number, and which menu item to select after activating the button.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Hi Ryan,
Unfortunately many Encore features that work for DVD do not work for Blu-ray, including supporting an audio and subtitle setup menu. This is true for all releases of Encore, CS3 through CS5. We have been trying to get them to fix some of these issues for over two years now, but Encore seems to be very low on Adobe’s priority list.
We showed them how to fix the setup menu problem in the weeks leading up to the CS5 release, and they produced a working patch, but it did not make it into the release. You can download the patch from our web site, here:
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/quickfix-encore-menus
Your chapter point question with a single timeline can be solved by using Encore playlists, and has been explained in earlier posts in this forum. Be sure to test it in a player, of course.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
OWC has installation videos to help you upgrade you machines’s memory and hard drive. You may contact me at my web site for more information.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Lautaro,
I am still confused why you need to update your computer if it is a 15″ Macbook Pro, even if it is a bit slow. I don’t remember that there was a single processor Macbook Pro. Is it just the older dual processor version, before the core 2 duo?
I had one of those in the 17″, (traded it for some programming help). To my mind, I don’t see a huge gain in updating to a new laptop, as long as yours is working. Certainly not to just the core 2 duo at a faster clock rate and a smaller screen. You are lucky if you have the express card slot, you can run a SATA raid with it. You will lose that with a new machine less than 17″. I can run my 4 TB external raid with one of those. (two 2 TB drives, very cheap these days).
I would save your money for something after the 64-bit FCP is released (and working well). Currently FCP can only use 4 GB. It is nice to have more for other applications, but I don’t typically do much else when I’m running FCP. You can update your memory to 4 GB and that may do enough for you. Having two video cards is only a battery-saving device. Yes, you will want a better machine eventually, but why not wait until FCP can take proper advantage of it? By then you will probably get more power for less money. I have heard that FCP 7 is slower than FCP 6.
Regards,
larry
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
To me the most important component is the screen. It is your view on the world. I have a 13″ 2.4 GHz MacBook Core 2 Duo with 2 GB and it performs very well, but I hate the lack of real estate and the tiny text. (I am quite a bit older than you). I use it at home with a 24″ screen attached and don’t travel much, so it is OK. I also don’t do heavy lifting on it, I am primarily a software engineer though I do run Final Cut and Adobe Encore on it, though more often on my Mac Pro.
For real estate alone I would go with the cheapest 15″ that you can get. I lust for a 17″, but that is a bit bulky and way too expensive. You might even consider a used 15″ from the previous generation, I don’t know about eBay in your country but there are reputable stores that buy up excess inventory and sell them at a discount.
Larry
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/