Adobe Encore

~ the last words ~

encore was a tool for wedding videographers and indie filmmakers. i was an engineering student in ankara who never made a video longer than a five-minute project clip, so the app sat outside my use case from start to end. the closest i got to a burned DVD with menus on it was the kind of family-archive disc that came back from a relative's wedding with autoplay set to the ceremony reel.

the app shipped in september 2003 as adobe encore DVD 1.0. it slotted into the adobe video line alongside premiere, taking the role that DVD studio pro played on the mac side. you finished a video edit in premiere, exported it as an mpeg-2 stream, opened encore, built a menu in photoshop layers with chapter buttons that linked to timecodes inside the stream. the disc burned out the other side as standard DVD-video that any standalone player would read.

the last full version was encore CS6 in april 2012. when adobe moved to creative cloud the next year, encore came along as an extra you could install but not as a primary CC application. by around 2019 the install was no longer being maintained, would not run cleanly on newer mac builds. adobe's lifecycle page marked it discontinued without much of a farewell post.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

the encore use case was very specific. a wedding videographer in 2005 needed to ship a finished DVD with menu and chapter markers, one button for the ceremony, another for the reception. an indie filmmaker wanted a festival-submission disc with similar plumbing. encore was the cheapest professional way to do either. on the mac side apple had DVD studio pro for that role, while at the high end hollywood post houses ran sonic scenarist. encore lived in the middle of those, priced for a freelancer and capable enough to ship a festival print.

~ the day it died ~

encore did not die on a single day. it shipped its last version as part of CS6 in april 2012. for a couple of years after that, you could still install it via creative cloud as legacy content. by 2017 it would not run on current macos without workarounds. by 2019 the adobe download was no longer reliably available and the lifecycle page listed it as no longer supported. the DVD menu as a form was already an artifact by then. encore was just the last tool that knew how to make one.

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