Why Encore CS4?

Jeff says:

As President of the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group (CHIFCPUG) I'm responsible for programming the monthly meetings. In March I highlighted one of my recent jobs that used Adobe's DVD authoring software, Encore CS4. Encore is extremely powerful and relatively new. It offers options that really helped us serve the client so I wanted to share some of it's best features with our members.

CHIFCPUG's newsletter caught the eye of Larry Jordan, world renowned Final Cut Pro guru. Larry is in the process of writing a book about using CS4 with Apple's Final Cut Studio and he was looking for real life examples. Here is my response to his inquiry.

Why Encore CS4?

First, some project details.

This was a doctor education project for a major pharmaceutical company. Our goal was to educate anesthesiologists on new anesthetic techniques using the companies' anesthetic agents. The budget was not huge by any stretch of the imagination and we had several hurdles to clear: the Medical Legal department, content experts in three states and doctors on two coasts. The final deliverable would be a DVD that sales people would use to sell doctors on the use of these agents.

We cut the sequences in Final Cut Pro. They consisted of seventeen different modules in various lengths, from 6 to 15 minutes. Graphics were created with Illustrator, After Effects, Motion and Photoshop.

After receiving initial approval from the content experts, we began authoring the DVD. Since this was a standard definition project I really could have done the authoring using DVD Studio Pro, but several factors steered me to Encore CS4:

Disclaimers

Legal disclaimer information is required for this type of sales tool, and it must be precise. We went through a number of rounds of changes as the client and their legal department tweaked the language and composition in these sections. Encore CS4's round-trip integration with Photoshop made this a breeze. They also had us create several other slide shows with prescribing information and references.

Check Project

This is a great feature of Encore CS4. I was able to catch missing end jumps and broken links before I sent it onto the client for approval.

Review and Approval

Encore’s ability to create a flash site from the DVD project made the review and approval process a breeze. Of course this project had a tight deadline and we needed to get approval for the navigation and layout of the menus quickly.

All I had to do was set the pull-down to “flash” and set up the compression. Within 30 minutes Encore had compressed all the movies and menus to complete the flash site. I was able to shave days off the process this way. We made multiple rounds of changes in one day, avoiding the delay and overhead of FedEx’ing a check disc to each of the content experts and Medical Legal teams.