Serif MoviePlus 4 review

Our current Best Buy video editing software, Adobe's Premier Elements, is based on the company's professional-level video-editing package, which costs over five hundred pounds.

By having this high-powered program to hand, Adobe can include lots of posh features and functions in its budget package, without spending loads of money on development.

Serif only sells one video editing program - so it doesn't have the luxury of being able to cherry-pick features from a professional product. As a result, MoviePlus 4 has been designed from the outset for ordinary home users. Even so, for a program that costs only sixty pounds it's positively crammed with sophisticated features. It can work with an unlimited number of video and audio tracks, so you can create really complex blends of footage and audio. It also offers a decent range of transitions. As usual, many of these are cheesy, but the cross-fade, cross-blur and fade to black transitions all work well and produce professional-looking results. The program includes excellent Help files and online tutorials to get beginners started, even if they have had no previous experience of video editing.

We were impressed too by the way MoviePlus uses a device called 'key frames' to give you highly specific control over the way in which you apply special effects. This is helpful for instances in which you don't wish to apply an effect to an entire clip. By marking two or more key frames to your timeline, you can specify where effects kick in, and when their parameters are altered. You might, for instance, want to turn your clip black and white, but then have it revert to colour. This can be done by applying the Black and White effect and adding two key frames; one at the start of your clip, and one a couple of minutes in. In the Properties of the first key frame, the effect level will be set at 100%. At the second key frame, the effect is switched off by turning its level to 0%. The first two minutes of your clip will now be in black and white, the rest in colour. Some other budget video editors don't offer this level of specificity.

In some other respects, however, Serif's MoviePlus doesn't keep up with its main competitors. It only has 16 types of effect (greyscale, diffuse glow, chroma key and so on) compared to 28 in the similarly priced Sony Vegas MovieStudio.

The way the program is laid out can also lead to confusion. For instance, if you're working on a project with a number of layered video streams, the timeline soon becomes cluttered with key frames and it's difficult to figure out which key frame applies to which stream.

Our Best Buy video-editing package, Adobe's Premiere Elements, has a better range of special effects and a much tidier, less-confusing, timeline.

On the other hand, if you just want a very straightforward, easy-to-use video editor for complete novices, go for Sony's Vegas Movie Studio. It's easy to use and it's built-in DVD authoring functions are much better than those of the copy of Sonic MyDVD bundled with this copy of MoviePlus.