Entered CNET Catalog: 02/13/2004
SKU: A25-420-111-0A000
Manufacturer: Ulead Systems Inc.
Manufacturer description
Ulead DVD Workshop 2 is powerful and intuitive authoring software for professional DVD creation. The straightforward workflow and design-centric interface guides you through the steps needed to create dynamic DVDs. It offers sophisticated tools for complex menu navigation, multiple subtitles, and multiple audio tracks with support for Dolby Digital AC-3. DVD Workshop 2 guarantees creative professionals a maximum return on investment, with a minimal learning curve. Work more productively with the visually intuitive storyboard interface. Follow the guided workflow to create professional DVDs in no time. Design dynamic DVDs with the extensive set of built-in tools. Create and modify text, menu layouts and titles - all in the same application. Add multiple subtitle and audio tracks, including Dolby Digital AC-3 audio. Import assets from a variety of formats and output to DVD, DLT, or DVD-9 with encryption and region coding.CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 03/23/2004
One of DVD Workshop 2.0's greatest strengths is its intuitive interface, which divides DVD-authoring projects into a five-step guided work flow: project setup, video capture, editing, menu creation, and output/export. A single screen handles each step, and the interface is smart enough to automatically switch steps if you wish to perform a task out of sequence.
DVD Workshop's content-editing and menu-creation screens do a fine job of shoehorning a lot of functionality into a small space. In addition to a nicely oversized preview window, there's a multipurpose content browser, as well as a tabbed tool area that lets you import and edit menu buttons, text, audio, video, images, and subtitles. DVD Workshop displays video titles in an easy-to-manage scrolling storyboard; selecting any title from the board displays a thumbnail filmstrip that provides access to that title's chapters. The program lacks time-line editing capabilities, but its storyboard implementation is so well integrated with the rest of the program's interface and toolset that you probably won't miss it.
 DVD Workshop is packed with learning aids such as detailed ToolTips, introductory step-by-step instructions for common tasks, and self-explaining placeholder icons that tell you where to drag objects. |
A wide selection of input options lets you use DVD Workshop 2.0 to capture live footage in both preset and custom formats; import AVI, QuickTime, MPEG, WMV, ASF, and other types of audio files; and even extract content from unencrypted DVD-Video discs. Better yet, every video title can be given 8 discrete audio and 32 subtitle tracks, each of which may be assigned a different language. The program can also convert still images into a video slide show that you can drop onto the storyboard and manipulate like any other video title.
DVD Workshop 2.0's powerful finishing options let you output to a host of formats, including DVD, Video CD, SVCD, and Digital Linear Tape (DLT); you can enable Macrovision, CSS, and region coding; and you can produce dual-layer DVD-9 projects and store ISO disc images and Video_TS folders on either fixed or removable storage devices. The program can also encode stereo Dolby Digital and multichannel Pro Logic soundtracks, and although it can't encode its own 5.1-channel Dolby Digital files, it can import previously created 5.1 audio content and pass it through as part of a finished DVD project.
DVD Workshop 2.0 turned in a speedy performance, comparable to those of other sub-$500 packages from Roxio. On our test bed, Workshop 2.0 took 32 minutes and 43 seconds to burn a Video CD project, including the time it required to transcode a 350MB DivX file to MPEG-1. Its SmartRendering feature made it possible to write our 1GB DVD-Video project to disc in 4 minutes and 49 seconds and to a hard drive folder in a mere 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Unfortunately, unlike most other competing applications, Workshop 2.0 couldn't maintain a preview frame rate greater than a few frames per second when capturing live video.
Our other criticisms are fairly minor, given the program's enormous power and flexibility. Nevertheless, we found it strange that the software lets you specify that an initial First Play video show before the Root Menu is displayed, but there's no other way to disable viewers' navigation controls. We were also vexed that DVD Workshop 2.0 lets you manage the size of your output files by setting bit rates in 1Kbps increments but doesn't provide a fit-to-disc function that would automatically choose the highest-quality bit rate for your project. Finally, we missed a snap-to-grid feature to complement the alignment grids that you can overlay on the program's menu-editing screen.
 Despite their luxurious oversized video-preview windows, DVD Workshop's editing and menu-creation screens pack a huge amount of functionality into a streamlined, easy-to-navigate layout. |
Most impressive is the company's phone support, which, unlike that of most of its competitors, includes unlimited free calls for all registered users for the life of the product. The support line is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT and requires a toll call. When calling near closing time on a midweek evening, we encountered a wait time of less than a minute. The support tech who answered the call knew the product well and was able to quickly resolve our problem.
User opinions
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User Rating: 
2/10
Very unreliable! Problems with audio & file corruption!
Pros: My initial impression was good of this program. Ulead works well if you have small segments of files under sixty minutes that you want to convert and burn to disk. I understand that it's capture works well, and that's about where the pros end.
Cons: Cons... where to start! It's Terrible!!! It's menus are to simplistic to the point of restricting the user, it loses links, crashes frequently, corrupts data, uses massive hard drive space, loses audio in conversion, and very has poor video quality.
The menus on this program are so simplistic as to really frustrate the average user. There are almost no right click options. Zero Tool bars, and very limited options on the so called editing interface.
It often crashes for no apparent reason dropping what could have been an hour or two worth of work if you don't remember to save often. Furthermore it will corrupt previous save files on occasion causing you to lose all your work and editing. This becomes rather bothersome because it can happen for no reason at all a file that was previously fine to load will all of a sudden not work.
Another thing that is very problematic for me is the amount of disk space that Ulead requires for each project is atrocious. It wants something in the order of 10GB per project not including the video or image files that it pulls from your computer.
If you have any video over an hour that you wish to burn you have to drop about 75% of the quality to fit it onto a disk which is very annoying considering you can rip a file from DVD that fit fine, and then Ulead cant fit it back onto the same size DVD without killing the quality and pixeling it all to hell because it seems to think that the file needs to be 10-12GB. Furthermore it doesn't seem to realize that DVD-R are 4.7GB not 4.4GB.
By far my favorite is the loss of audio everything else may have been tolerable if not for the fact that you get no audio half the time . For some reason Ulead likes to drop the audio and menu functionality on it's burns. I Assume it's because it forces you to drop the quality level significantly to fit a 80 minute long file onto a 120 minute DVD.
Another thing that is annoying is that it likes to lose all your file links at random. You can be right in the middle of something and all the files you were working with will suddenly drop requiring you to go back and manually input them again, and when you do get them inputted it cant remember what your settings where.
There are a few other very annoying features as well, but the bottom line is this program is terrible so do not waste your money on it. In my opinion it has severe problems with registry it cant keep files straight and it dose not perform well on the most basic of features I would expect in a DVD authoring program.
User Rating: 
6/10
Great when it works
Pros: Generally easy and flexible
Cons: Error info on crashes is non existent. Online support-none
User Rating: 
9/10
Simple and Powerful
Pros: Very intuitive visually, accepts any format I throw at it and is very stable. Easy to intigrate extra content for such as buttons or overlays.
Cons: If you import a background (or anything else) into your project it will be there for every project from then on. This can be a good thing if you are doing cookie cutter authoring, otherwise annoying.
User Rating: 
3/10
Good for capture and burn, Bad if you actually want to EDIT!
Pros: Good size real-time capture and preview window. Easy to capture and catalog DV. Easy to organize Video clips and Audio tracks.
Cons: Gets Very slow towards end of project, and has trouble switching from one task window to another. It is very time consuming to compile a DVD from video clips. The program has no easy way to track and direct multiple (over 20) video clips per menu button.
User Rating: 
1/10
Keeps crashing (error: 800413a8 on multiplex) after hours of processing...
Pros: Once you get the hang of it it is truly very powerful with lot's of features.
Cons: No support if you haven't purchased the product. But how can you purchase a product that costs $500 USD and in the DEMO version NEVER manages to create an ISO image because it keeps throwing error: 800413a8 on final multiplexing. Very frustrating to see t
User Rating: 6/10
Easier than I imagined
Pros: Played with the software for an hour and got the hang of all of the basics - very easy to use. Everything that I could imagine doing seems possible.
Cons: Crashed during editing twice in my first hour (although haven't gotten latest patch). No big deal if you save often.
User Rating: 2/10
not for home video editors
Pros:
Cons: lousy interface - not intuitive. have to select edit and press some small obscure button to import video stored on hard drive. then unable to review frame by frame. lousy setup
User Rating: 2/10
Always crashes
Pros: Seems to have many good features which aren't too hard to use but it simply won't work!
Cons: Program always crashes with unspecified error 800413a8 while trying to finally create the DVD - after about an hour and a half of trying
User Rating: 9/10
Tried 'em all - this is the best!
Pros: Easy, intuitive interface and amazing out of the box capabilities such as motion menus, motion video thumbnails in menus, all very simply accomplished. I have tried most all of them - DVD Architect 1 and 2, DVD-lab, Sonic DVDit Pro, Adobe's DVD package,
Cons: None so far
User Rating: 1/10
Unspecified error!
Pros: When it works it is great.
Cons: When it doesn't it is useless and you need to hire Sherlock Holmes to figure how to resolve it. Absolute crap.
User Rating: 1/10
terrible, terrible program
Pros: easy to uninstall
Cons: how bad is this program? Let me count the ways 1. keeps crashing. I have 20 machines running version 2.0. Half of them reboot during the dvd creation process. the other half get "Unspecified error 80041b59" error messages, which I haven't been able to
User Rating: 9/10
It really is that good
Pros: I used version 1 and liked the way it helped me quickly create a DVD, but also gave me the flexibility to customize my menus that look very professional. I did end up upgrading to version 2 and all I can say is WOW! It got even better. I don't even have t
Cons: I wish it were a little cheaper but.
