Why still no AC3 5.1 export?

Question

It puzzles me that Adobe tries to present Production Premium CS6 as a complete solution for video editing and disc authoring, but yet it lacks a simple option to export as AC3 in 5.1 channels. As far as I know, every other NLE has the option, at least I know Edius and Vegas do, and if I remember correctly, even the old FCP had it through Compressor. But new versions of Premiere keep coming out, and still no 5.1 AC3, unless of course you want to spend $300 in that Surcode encoder, which is like a bad joke. "Hey, you just paid a ton of money for the Production Premium package, but if you want 5.1 AC3, you have to spend another $300."
I was lucky that I had an older version of Vegas and I got an email from Sony that yesterday the upgrade to the newest version was only $99.95, so I bought it and now I can export 5.1 AC3, with the extra step of exporting a 6 channel wave file, importing it into Vegas and then exporting from there. I understand that many of the people that use Premiere might send the uncompressed file to some audio lab for encoding, but not everybody has the budget to do that, which would be pointless anyway if you already did the mix in Premiere or Audition and only need to export to AC3 for a DVD or Blu-ray.
Annoyingly enough, I exported a 6 channel wave file from Premiere, imported it into Vegas and exported it as 5.1 AC3, but when I loaded it in Encore it allows the file to go untranscoded for a Blu-ray disc, but it requires recompress for DVD (of course without 5.1 since it's not available in the quality presets), so if I have the same project that needs to be authored to both disc formats, I would have to do one with Encore and the other with Sony's DVD Architect. Absolutely ridiculous for what is supposed to be a complete solution. And the AC3 encoder in Vegas is Dolby certified.
Unless of course I missed something and it's available somewhere, but I did a search for both AC3 and Dolby in both the Premiere and the Audition PDF manuals and there's no mention of it.

Answer 1

In the case of Sony Vegas, Sony has a direct licensing agreement with Dolby Labs. Because of the nature of the Sony license, they can offer DD 5.1 SS on some pretty inexpensive programs. Though I doubt that Sony would respond, I do agree with Jim Simon, that one would have to inquire of those companies, exactly how they do the licensing.
Adobe does not, so licenses the DD through Minnetonka Audio, and the SurCode encoding module.
Some NLE's offer 5.1 SS encoding, but not DD certified 5.1 SS. In those cases, the DD 5.1 SS logo cannot be applied to the DVD's, or BD's, as it can if the SurCode module is used, with but a little paperwork. I do not have a list of the certified, and non-certified DD encoding, but a bit of research on the Dolby Labs Web site might yield such info.
Also, Minnetonka does not charge that much more for the SurCode encoding module, above the licensing fee that they pay to Dolby Labs. I was surprised at how expensive that license was, relative to the price of the SurCode module, when I inquired about "volume licenses" from Minnetonka. They were very forthcoming with details, some years ago - also, at that time, they offered a special Adobe-user license deal, but that was dropped a bit later, and, unless something has changed, the fee for Premiere users is the same as buying directly from Minnetonka Audio.
Just some observations,
Hunt