MoviePlus X6

Serif’s MoviePlus X6 is a video editing program that aims to provide a range of powerful editing tools in a simple-to-use interface. You only have to look at the Serif web site and product packaging to see at once that the target audience for MoviePlus is the amateur or ‘home’ user. Mothers and babies feature rather heavily on all the MoviePlus pages and promotional materials.

In fact MoviePlus can be used for far more demanding projects than just splicing together a few clips of baby’s first steps. In common with much more expensive packages, it has a multi-track timeline onto which you can place numerous video and audio tracks. The clips on each track can be dragged and dropped, cut to length, copied and pasted, panned and zoomed. You can add text and titles, you can blend one clip into another using transitions such as fades, wipes and ‘page turns’. You can apply special effects to add glows, shadows and swirls to video, and reverbs, pans and bass boost to audio.

If you want to record the video first and then record a narration later, that’s no problem – all the tools are there, read to click and use. You can render videos in various formats for playback from disk or online, or on DVD and Blu-ray. There are even special tools to help you render, optimise and upload video to YouTube and Facebook.

There are two editing modes. If you find the timeline baffling you can switch to storyboard mode. This lets you stick clips together in the form of discrete blocks then add a narration or music if you wish. For more complete editing features you will need to use the timeline. This lets you do editing at a much finer level of detail so that you can (for example) add or remove keyframes to apply edits and effects at precise points on the track.

Overall, MoviePlus X6 does a good job of making pretty sophisticated video editing easy to use for the non-specialist. But it doesn’t have the budget-end of the market to itself. In particular, it faces very stiff competition from Sony Vegas (see review). In its favour, MoviePlus is a bit easier to get started with than Vegas. For example, it makes it easier to create animated text effects by setting parameters for ‘in’ and ‘out’ animations in a docked panel. And its timeline ‘thumb’ scroller is more responsive than the Vegas equivalent.

But Vegas is, in essence, a more serious product. In its higher-end editions (Platinum and above) it is more squarely aimed at professional-level users or serious amateurs. If you are serious about making videos and are prepared to put in some learning effort, I’d recommend one of the editions of Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum. But if you prefer to have something that’s a bit more beginner-friendly, then MoviePlus may fit the bill.