Start a dvd rental business

Byline: Jeff Sauer

I suppose I shouldn't be shocked to see the price of a video product go up. Prices of just about everything in our lives go up all the time. But the trend in digital video over the last several years has been the opposite, especially for DVD authoring products. In fact, nowhere has the bottom fallen out of "professional" prices more than with DVD creation tools, which about five years ago started at $10,000 and now cost in the hundreds.

However, raising the price is just what Ulead has done with its new version of DVD Workshop 2. The new DVD Workshop 2 lists for $495, about $200 more than previous versions, and on the surface that's a bold move to say the least. But it's easy to see where Ulead is going with the move. Today's prominent professionally oriented DVD authoring products - Apple's DVD Studio Pro and Adobe's Encore DVD, as well as Sonic's ReelDVD - sell for roughly $600 to $700. Ulead essentially broke into DVD authoring about three years ago by way of its video editing software (Video Studio and Media Studio Pro) and with modest, "accessible" capabilities. The company believes DVD Workshop has matured enough to join the aforementioned heavy hitters.

DVD Workshop 2 now has many professional features, starting with support for DVD's eight audio and 32 subtitle tracks (there's also a new subtitle editor). There's full 16:9 support, region coding, parental control, Dolby Digital support (stereo only on output), CSS encryption and Macrovision copy protection, DLT and DVD-9 support, as well as better design tools. Feature for feature, Ulead is now essentially playing in the same game as those more expensive tools. But $495 is a little bit below the prices of the others, and that's probably good. DVD Workshop has matured, but it still hasn't shed all of its consumer origins.

DVD Workshop 2 still looks much like the previous version, with a single authoring and preview window dominating much of the interface. Five tabs across the top left of the interface walk you through Start (choosing among VCD, SVCD, or DVD and saving a project name), Capture, Edit (clip editing, as well as grouping audio, video, and subtitle tracks and building slideshows), Menu creation, and Finish (burning). As with many authoring products, there's a library window on the left for organizing your assets.

The Capture feature is designed to take raw footage straight from a DV camcorder to disc. (Capture also now takes MVMicro, WMV, and VOB files off existing DVD discs.) This has only minor practical use for professionals, save for quick offloading of raw footage for archive or digital dailies. In fact, Workshop can burn directly to disc from capture with no authoring at all, and that feature has some business appeal for quick recording and distribution of presentations and conferences. But Capture is really a legacy of Ulead's initial consumer focus, and there's no reason for Ulead to remove it. Most pros will probably start with files on disc, so as you move through the interface Workshop automatically jumps straight from Start to Edit, and that's where you import video files into the library.

The Edit tab is where you move media files from the library into the Content Window, an effective linear storyboard for the video clips you'll use in a project. There's a First Play placeholder that you can use (or not) for programming a video to play before Main Menu. On rental DVDs this is commonly the FBI warning, although it could be anything from an advertisement, a 10-second company promo, or an entire movie that would just play when loaded into a DVD player.

"Edit" is also where you can trim clips, split clips, and set chapter points. When you create chapter marks, they appear one after another in a second vertical, storyboard-like window positioned on the right side of the interface. Thumbnails both for clips and chapter points are created from the first frame, but can be changed to any frame easily.

Workshop supports DVD's eight audio tracks per video clip. The program has capable features for trimming audio clips to match video, matching audio duration to video, setting audio levels, and even audio fade-in/out. Those are nice features courtesy of Ulead's editing software, but it's a real shame Ulead hasn't borrowed a timeline interface for doing them. As it is, you're left with an unnecessary series of mouse clicks rather than a familiar and efficient methodology. The same is true of Workshop's new subtitle editor. It's a tedious task in any application, but Ulead could do a lot better job of eliminating awkward movement between your mouse and keyboard to make its subtitle editor far more efficient.

Moving into the Menu tab, Ulead has followed a nice industry trend of offering easy templates for building menus quickly and the ability to build menus from scratch using your own graphics. There's even a third method, a Wizard, to essentially build menus for you. And even if you start with Ulead's stock templates, you can reposition buttons as necessary, with a helpful semi-transparent grid for aligning elements. That's proven to be an important feature for Apple and Adobe. Ulead now even supports DVD color-mapping, although it's in a simplified form that should help those unfamiliar with this esoteric yet powerful DVD feature.

The Menu tab also has a few advanced navigation features, like the ability to create a Playlist of clips or actions that can be launched by just one button, and you can specify which button on a menu is the default selection. On the other hand, Workshop does not support any more custom end actions, post commands, or GPRM/SPRM-oriented logic, and that keeps it a step between Encore and DVD Studio Pro 2.

Overall, Workshop's interface takes an approach different from either of those two, and that is either a plus or minus depending on your experience building DVDs. Experienced users may find the five-tab, methodical approach simplistic and bulky. But those tabs should help novice authors do professional work - as should storyboards for clips and chapters and the multiple ways to create menus.

I am always disappointed when applications don't follow traditional Windows convention, as Workshop does not. After all, if you've worked with just about any other computer program, you know to go to the File menu for basic commands like New, Open, Save, Save As, etc. Undo, Redo, and Preferences or Settings should be within an Edit menu. Workshop, of course, has those functions (and does use some conversional keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc.), but they're not where you'd expect, and thus, you unnecessarily need to learn new conventions and cryptic little icons. In Workshop those icons are spread around the interface.

I could also grumble about the somewhat unconventional use of single and double clicks. And the extremely diminutive physical size of some of the interface elements make otherwise straightforward tasks like marking in/out points or moving between clips to view chapter points something like playing a video game.

Still, many of my caveats for Workshop are the type that fade with familiarity and use. It's more important that Ulead has bolstered the application with most of the features professionals need. The bottom line is that DVD Workshop 2 is maturing and, with it, moving more firmly into the professional category of DVD authoring software. Existing users certainly will not be happy about the sizeable upgrade cost, but they will be pleased with the new feature set.

BOTTOM LINE

Company: Ulead Torrance, Calif.; (800) 858-5323 www.ulead.com

Product: DVD Workshop 2

Assets: Use easy templates for menus or build your own from scratch; powerful audio functions like matching audio duration to video and audio fade-in/out.

Caveats: No timeline for linking video and audio clips; interface does not follow standard Windows conventions.

Demographic: DVD authors from novice to professional.

Price: $495

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