Encore looks very similar to how it did in CS3, because it's improvements are nearly entirely under the hood..
Encore CS4
As with many of the other programs in the CS4 suite, Encore boasts improvements that perfect the new features in CS3. Most noticeable of these improvements is the ability to create multiple sizes of Flash documents for export, including all flavors of HD (as opposed to the CS3 version, which could only generate Flash documents that were the Square Pixel SD size of 640 px by 480 px). Additionally, improvements in BluRay authoring allows you to add pop up menus that can play over top of live playing video, which is a very next-gen professional feature.
Perhaps the most amazing new feature to be introduced in Encore CS4 is the new Premiere Pro to Encore Dynamic Link, which allows you to drag a timeline straight out of Premiere Pro into Encore without rendering out an intermediate video clip. While you will have to wait quite a bit longer for the final DVD render when you use this feature, this makes DVD authoring SO much simpler and less hard drive intensive.
For more information on Encore CS4, check back next issue when Eric Henninger will explore it in greater depth in his Premiere Pro review.
Flash CS4's new animation abilities behave much more like After Effects animation, making the program much easier for video people to pick up.
Flash CS4
Flash has been amazingly improved in the CS4 release, especially for video people. It’s highly enhanced animation structure is now starting to resemble After Effects rather closely, with much more intuitive keyframing and motion path creation. Another improvement in the animation department is that Flash will now allow you to add “bones” to illustrations to further simplify complex animation. (In layman’s terms, Bones make animation easier in a similar way to how the Puppet tool facilitated animation in After Effects CS3.)
In addition to some of the behavioral improvements, the folks in the Flash department redesigned the backend environment of Flash from the ground up in the CS4 release. Now everything INSIDE the Flash program is actually displayed IN the Flash environment. Previously, when you used Flash and you saw a preview, you were seeing it inside a visual programming language that wasn’t actually Flash. That’s the reason that when you actually exported Flash files, they would often look somewhat different in web browsers than they had in the Flash program. (Very similar to the way HTML files look different in Dreamweaver than they do when you observe them in Internet Explorer or Firefox.) Well now, when you create your animation in Flash, you’re seeing it EXACTLY as it will look on the internet. This is something important to bring up because it shows how much work Adobe has put into polishing and perfecting its products in the CS4 line.
