BIOS: Technology Means Business

Ulead System's DVD Workshop 2.0 is one of the most intuitive programs available for turning raw footage into CD- or DVD-based video (4:3 and 16:9) complete with titles, effects, and menus. You should note, though, that it's designed to create discs from video and audio files that have already been processed into their final form, unlike most sub-£100 consumer applications. As a result, DVD Workshop 2.0 offers only basic storyboard-based video-editing functionality and provides no titling, overlay, audio-mixing or effects capabilities. In addition, experienced authors may find its hand-holding interface stifling and will miss the lack of timeline editing and multi-channel Dolby Digital encoding. Nevertheless, DVD Workshop 2.0 is a breeze to use and its disc-finishing and menu-creation tools options are exemplary.

Pros: Supports DLT, CSS, AC-3, region coding and Macrovision
Cons: No timeline editing or multi-channel Dolby Digital encoding

There's suddenly an abundance of software available for creating DVD-Videos. Due to the popularity of DV camcorders, digital cameras and Web cameras, an increasing number of individuals are looking to produce polished personal videos and businesses are bringing the responsibility of creating video materials for marketing purposes in-house. Pitched at a slightly different audience than Pinnacle Systems' Studio 9.0 and Roxio's VideoWave 7 Pro, DVD Workshop 2.0 is a relatively powerful and intuitive software package for creating professional-looking DVD-Videos, Video-CDs (VCD) and Super VCDs (SVCD) from files that have already been processed into their final form.

Features new to version 2.0 include the ability to add multiple subtitles, for creating discs with up to the DVD maximum of 32 selectable subtitle tracks, and up to eight multiple audio tracks for including different languages, commentaries, programming for the visually-impaired, or different levels of instruction. Ulead System's has also added copy protection, allowing you to protect your intellectual property rights with CSS encryption and Macrovision encoding when authoring to a DVD, and region coding for further protecting your work by specifying the DVD regions where your disc can be played.

DVD Workshop 2.0 also sees the inclusion of a real-time preview, an easy-to-use window that previews the exact behaviour of your DVD in real-time, which should help you to get a feel for how your video, audio, slideshow and subtitles work before committing to disc. There's also a playlist control that lets you specify the relationships between menus, videos, subtitles, and audio tracks to determine the sequence of play items to loop at specified times or certain actions to trigger multiple choices, and you can now import audio from audio CDs to create soundtracks, or background music for menus and slideshows.

Although DVD Workshop 2.0 is more powerful than many low-end applications, it retains the intuitive hand-holding creation process favoured by those new to video editing, making it hard to get lost within the software's tools and options. For instance, after choosing to start a new project in either PAL/SECAM or NTSC TV modes, DVD Workshop 2.0's five-step guided workflow (Start, Capture, Edit, Menu and Finish) then moves you onto the Capture part of the software, allowing you to import video from FireWire interface cards (OHCI compliant), analogue capture cards (VFW and WDM support), USB capture devices/Web cameras, Windows-compatible DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, CD-R/RW drives, as well as TV footage (requires TV tuner card).

Video files supported include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MicroMV, WMV, AVI and QuickTime, while audio formats supported include MPEG audio (MPA), WAV, MP3, WMA and Dolby Digital. Compatible image files include BMP, GIF, JPEG, JP2, JPC, PNG, TGA, TIFF, UFO and PSD. Once you've created your movies, you can then export them to DVD-5, DVD-9, miniDVD, VCD and SVCD discs, or Digital Linear Tape (DLT).

After capturing video, you're then presented with Edit tools. From here you can arrange, edit, and trim video clips quickly and relatively easily. You can also insert titles, drag-and-drop video and images clips onto the timeline, or preview a video. You can also create slideshows, set chapters for your menus, and add extra audio tracks and subtitles to your project.

The Menu section lets you create the menu for your project, allowing you to create an easy way for your viewers to instantly access specific points in your movie. You can either use the high-quality preset menu templates provided with the software or create a custom menu. Once, you're happy with the look and feel of your video, you can then burn your movie onto a disc, burn and create a disc image file, or create a master copy on a Digital Linear Tape which you can send to a DVD replication facility for mass production.

There's not a great deal you can criticise with DVD Workshop 2.0, as long as you don't purchase it to edit timelines. However, we were disappointed that although you can manage the size of your output files by setting bit rates in 1Kbit/s increments, there's no facility to provide a fit-to-disc function to automatically choose the highest-quality bit rate for your project. We'd also like to have seen a snap-to-grid feature to complement the alignment grids that you can overlay on the program's menu-editing screen, as well as support for DivX.

Links:
DVD Workshop 2.0 Web site
DVD Workshop 2.0 30-day trial (67.1MB)