Jimco Software Reviews - DVD Workshop 2.2 (continued)
Interface
The interface in DVD Workshop (shown in figure 1) is broken up into multiple steps; Start, Capture, Edit, Menu, and Finish. It you read my review of Sonic's DVDit!, this will seem familiar to you. In fact, this is a common approach for DVD authoring software and it works well.
Figure 1 - Main Dialog
At the top of DVD Workshop's interface is the Step Panel (picture in figure 2.) This panel provides quick access to each step. You're likely to find yourself progressing through these steps in order, but you'll also want to flip back in cases where you want to tweak something here and there. The Step Panel makes doing so easy and it's small enough to stay out of the way.
Figure 2 - The Step Panel
Capture Step
After creating a new DVD Workshop project, the next step will depend upon whether or not your media has already been transferred to your computer. If you're using Sony Vegas or another video editing tool, you likely already have an MPEG 2 file for your DVD. (You can use other file types as well, but for the majority of this review, I will be focusing on DVD.) If you don't have a video file already, the Capture step allows you to capture video from a digital video device, an analog device (analog capture card required), a TV tuner (TV tuner card required), or from a Sony MICROMV camcorder.