Adobe's marketing message about using Encore to produce DVD, Flash, and Blu-ray from the same project is misleading. In fact, trying to do Blu-ray as if it were DVD just makes things more difficult, and exposes the many bugs that have plagued Encore Blu-ray output from its inception with CS3 to CS5.5 today.
Almost all commercial Blu-ray releases today use popups, and do not support the "Title" button on the remote. It turns out this is also the means to bypass most of Encore's problems, and to easily fix those issues that remain with BluStreak Tracer. Not only will this approach make your masterpiece more like a studio release, but it will actually be much easier to author, a lot less work, and will avoid unnecessary encoding.
These methods were used to produce the two tutorials 12 Tangos and Iceland Film. These tutorials are complete Encore projects with all assets plus the modified BDMV folder with the edited commands. They can serve as templates for many if not most of your authoring needs.
It turns out the one thing that Encore did right for Blu-ray is the excellent Photoshop integration for multi-page popup menus. This is far superior to even DVD Studio Pro's DVD menu creation support. With this approach, you work with a single Photoshop file that contains all of the menus in your project. You can easily edit this file in both Photoshop and Encore, doing the visual things in Photoshop and the navigation links in Encore.
You can place this popup over all of the tracks in your project, and do the navigation links once in Encore. Then in Tracer you can make the first page of the menu "always on" over your introductory video, which would have been your main motion menu in DVD. Then the same menu can be a popup over the main movie track. Unlike motion menus, there is no re-encoding of the video needed. You can also place the same popup over your bonus tracks, and if you wish use auto-activated buttons and general-purpose registers (GPR's) to direct navigation to a different sub-menu (page) than the one over your other tracks. This navigation will take place invisibly and the desired page will pop-up immediately with no delay in the Blu-ray player.
Blu-ray movie mode commands as used by BluStreak Tracer are much easier to understand than the arcane DVD command set, and you have plenty of registers to work with. In fact, 4,086 registers vs. 16 in DVD and only 8 available in DVD Studio Pro. We believe that most authors can understand their use by following our tutorials and tracing through command playback.
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