for more information on this award, see HERE

Here two video tracks are shown in the top part of the MoviePlus workspace. The built-in Explorer, bottom left, shows video clips in the current directory with a preview pane alongside.

Whether you make movies for a living or just for fun, you will need some dedicated video editing software. At the high end, packages such as Adobe’s Première are costly. If you haven’t got a Première sized budget, Serif’s MoviePlus may be a better choice. Given its quite modest price you might be surprised to discover just how many ‘high end’ features this has.

MoviePlus uses a multi-track timeline editor. This means that you can arrange video and audio clips onto separate horizontal bands or ‘tracks’ and cut, move or edit the clips on each individual track. The tracks can be combined to form a movie by selectively fading elements on different tracks in and out, merging one video clip into another or adding voice and music tracks. You can instantly preview your movie at any time using a set of video-player controls at the top of the screen or by dragging a time-line marker over all the tracks to preview specific sections. In addition, by clicking an ‘eye’ icon at the start of each track you can toggle that track on or off at any time.

There are numerous image processing options and special effects available. These include the ability to sharpen or soften an image, alter its brightness and contrast and selectively change the colours. To add an effect you just click a graphic item in a panel and drop the associated effect into the editing workspace. The effect is given its own timeline and you can adjust its properties such as colour and keyframe time in a panel. The keyframe time defines the point in the timeline at which the effect becomes active. Interpolations - the rate at which effects are faded in and out - are calculated automatically but can be adjusted by the user.

A variety of transition effects is supplied so that you can join one clip to another using fades, zooms, wipes and even fancy effects such as spirals and spins which cause the new clip to spin into view over the preceding clip. Once again, transitions are added simply by dragging and dropping them into the timeline. You can even create ‘picture in picture’ movies with one small clip playing in the corner of a larger one or split-screen effects with multiple clips playing simultaneously - ideal for fans of ‘24’!

MoviePlus lets you add various media types to your projects. These include video files in AVI, MPEG, WMV and other formats, still pictures such as BMP, GIF, JPEG and PING formats and audio tracks in MP3, WAV or WMA. You can also capture video and audio directly from a variety of sources including digital camcorders, video capture cards - even mobile phones and audio CDs.

When a video is imported, it is automatically analysed and divided up into discrete clips - which MoviePlus considers to be the logical start and end points of various ‘scenes’. Usually it is simpler to work with many fairly small scenes than with one monolithic clip. You can selectively increase or decrease the sensitivity of the software’s scene detection to divide a clip into many or few sections. If you set the sensitivity to zero, no scene detection at all is done.

Overall, MoviePlus is an impressively powerful product in this price bracket. As an added bonus, the software comes with an additional DVD containing about 1000 sound effects plus music tracks and video clips. There is even a version of Sonic Software’s MyDVD for burning videos onto DVD media. I experienced some problems with MyDVD which sometimes reported a fatal problem on loading. Bizarrely, the software continues to work as long as I leave the error dialog open! Sonic has informed me that they have been unable to reproduce this error which they believe may be due to a conflict with some other application. They tell me that no reports of this problem have been received from other reviewers or customers.

In spite of the problems I experienced with MyDVD, I must say I am mightily impressed with MoviePlus 4 itself. This is a genuinely powerful video editing suite at a remarkably low price.

Huw Collingbourne

June 2005