[Marc Brown]

Just an update on my own progress:

1: Encore seems to like the length of audio files after trimming only five samples. Whatever.

2: Encore definitely DOES add button graphics BEFORE the loop point, as is revealed by playing the m4v file it creates from the menu.

What the heck am I supposed to do about this? According to what I have read, Encore is not supposed to turn button graphics on until the loop point is reached. Yet there they are.

[Marc Brown]

Encore definitely tried to re-encode the already-transcoded file it had created earlier. I watched it work at it for a few minutes. I also averted a potential catastrophe by making a backup of the ~19GB video before I let Encore touch it. This proved to be a good idea, as Encore completely eliminated the original.

[Marc Brown]

For the record, I already “solved” this one by manually recreating the entire chapter list with Notepad. Though I will also point out that I’ve had to type that list back into Encore three separate times because of crashes or, once again, Encore’s refusal to play nice with already-transcoded media.

To answer your question, well, just google “Encore” and “untranscoded”. I’m not alone. Encore has continuing difficulty correctly identifying valid media as valid – even if it’s something Encore itself transcoded. In my case, this has manifested in a couple of ways. First case: Encore forgot that I had already told it to transcode a particular file which took 24 hours to complete. Second case: Encore failed to recognize a replacement file as having already been transcoded (my guess is that it was defaulting to the transcode status of the file which got replaced).

I also encountered the bug during the building of the Blu-ray disc where it will stop building if the audio is a tiny bit longer than the video (which is, itself, a miscalculation on Encore’s part). The fix for this is a kludge, but I will take it.

[Marc Brown]

Thanks for the reply. I gave this a shot, but as I half-anticipated, the resulting output was identical to what I got by setting the workspace as 16-235, as was the resulting Blu-ray video. In either case, what I was trying to figure out was why I couldn’t generate a video with AE which displayed the full color space without crushing anything, on different displays. Make no mistake: I know it can be done. Every single Blu-ray movie I own manages to do it.

I would say that the fact that even the experts in this forum sidestepped this query really says a lot about its perplexity.

[Marc Brown]

Bleh. So I gather Encore simply cannot export chapter information.

[Marc Brown]

Pretty much the conclusion I regretfully came to, after digging deeper into it. Plus, it seems that Encore’s own subtitle capabilities do not even render in the resolution specified by the video asset; SD seems to be the default.

[Marc Brown]

Well, I didn’t have Encore in front of me. Moot point. I’ll have it again tomorrow, albeit a bit late for sneaking in a menu, heh.

[Marc Brown]

Thanks for the reply.

Well, I am no professional at this. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. The project I am working on is a home video for my family. I never anticipated running into so many issues before this weekend, which is when I wanted to show it. Most of those issues were in the form of Encore crashing for unspecified reasons, typically halfway through processes which took a day or longer to fully complete.

The point is that I’m looking at trying to finish everything in the next 12 hours or so, and a critical missing ingredient is an Encore-friendly menu .PSD, with compliant buttons and layers intact, which I can quickly and easily modify from within Photoshop. I don’t need animation; really all I’m after is a menu indicating two different audio tracks to pick from (I developed a commentary track).

Much as I would like to get the project finished by this evening, it is not worth $89 for me to do so. In fact I have already exhausted my limited budget upgrading my pc. It’s just a home video. I had hoped that somebody would take pity and use their doubtless grand expertise to slap together a .PSD in the ~30 seconds it probably takes for somebody who knows what they’re doing (or has such a template already sitting around).

I’ll keep hunting around for a free download, though.

[Marc Brown]

Thanks for the reply.

I just want to be 100% clear on this. My asset is raw, and I know Encore will add keyframes at chapter points when it compiles the entire disc build. But that’s a different process from when you right-click an asset and pick “transcode now”. The thing that worries me is that the raw video asset is separate from the timeline asset, and it’s only the timeline which contains the chapter points. And it’s probably possible in Encore to use the same video asset in more than one timeline, which would mean it would be possible to have two+ different sets of chapter points associated with the same video, prior to transcoding.

It’s confusing. Lots of things about Adobe products are counterintuitive and demand nothing less than rote memorization of a given app’s quirks.

[Marc Brown]

That’s a pretty amazing trick. Thanks for helping out.

I gave it a whirl, but it seems that whatever bit of ram Time Warp is illegally utilizing is not part of what AE is able to purge. I watched ram usage during the render. Sure enough, it freed up 500mb at one point, but it was all used up again within three or four frames.

This bug is some serious fun.