Uleads DVD Workshop (DW) is a pared-down digital video editor, designed specifically with DVD fans in mind. Its able to work natively with both MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, as well as AVIs and even QuickTime movies. Its set up to create slideshows from still images, and it can write DVDs, VCDs and SVCDs. And while DW packs quite a few powerful features, its intuitive, well-designed interface makes it relatively easy for newcomers to step through creating a DVD.

DVD Workshop breaks the process of mastering a DVD into five stages, and each has its own corresponding menu: Start, Capture, Edit, Menu and Finish. Most of these stages are fairly self explanatory: Capture lets you save videos from external sources (and covers just about everything, from USB cameras, to Firewire DV Camcorders and capture cards); Edit cuts your videos into titles and chapters and also lets you create slide-shows; Menu creates a page which links all your DVD elements together; and Finish lets you preview the final product and output it to the format of your choice.

The program centres around a large preview window (which is always a plus when youre dealing with anything visual), which alternates in function depending on what mode youre in. This neatly ties the program together, and makes it fairly painless when moving from one stage to the next.

DVD Workshop isnt really a fully-fledged DV editing program its real focus is on the final stages of DVD authoring. That is, in transferring an already complete movie onto a DVD and adding all the trimmings. At its heart are sophisticated creation tools, allowing you to edit your movie into individual titles, chapters and generally make it work as a DVD. Menu creation offers a huge number of pre-made templates and backgrounds just waiting for you to drop in your own clips and text. However, DWs most useful and outstanding feature is the ability to create your own menus from scratch.

Creating an original menu in DW is a simple process, akin to basic Webpage design. You start with a completely blank template and add your own background, thumbnails, text and imagery simply through dragging-and-dropping them wherever you want. You then link these menu objects to your DVD content by dragging and dropping from a thumbnail list at the bottom of the page.

Theres quite a fine-degree of control here: anything and everything is malleable, and with an accompanying image editor like Photoshop youll be able to crank out menus that are indistinguishable (and maybe even better) than those seen on professional DVDs. Its also possible to instantly check out any changes you make while editing the menu, as the Finish menu contains an up-to-date preview of the finished product.

Where DVD Workshop really stumbles is in value: at over $650 its a fairly expensive investment, even in the costly world of DV. At this price, it would have been nice to see more developed editing facilities to round the program off.

Advanced users will also be annoyed that DW seemingly forces you to encode all your variable-bitrate videos using its own encoding algorithm. Before burning your movie to a DVD, you are prompted to choose from a variety of quality settings, or you can manually set them yourself. DW wont re-encode your fixed-rate videos so long as they match its own encoding settings. However, when we tested a piece of MPEG-2 video with a variable-bitrate, DW could not be persuaded to leave it as is instead it spent over an hour re-encoding it. Very annoying.

Its a shame DVD Workshop carries such a large price tag, because its an excellent tool for DVD buffs. It goes a long way to creating the perfect DVD mastering package, although to make the most of it youll also need sophisticated DV and image editing programs to work alongside it.