MoviePlus is a video editing software by Serif which aims to compete with giants like Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut And Sony Vegas. The software has come a long way from it’s initial release back in 2003. Originally MoviePlus was intended to be used for converting MiniDV recorded videos to DVDs but it’s come to support a large array of formats and is now a favorite of many home video enthusiasts.

THE REVIEW

INSIDE THE BOX

Sporting the same colors as its predecessor, MoviePlus X5 comes in a sleek purple-black case.

FEATURES & OVERVIEW

The latest release Serif X5 has added many new features to the already excellent piece of software including the ability to generate MPEG-4, Quicktime and direct High Definition HDV files. As far as hardware requirements for MoviePlus X5 are concerned you need at least a Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading or an AMD Athlon XP processor along with 1GB of RAM but multiple cores are highly recommended.

For beginners there’s a helpful How To panel on the left inside the main program which give quick one click hints and tips which we’ve found pretty useful when we started using the program. There are also mini video tutorials and sample projects that really improve your skills. Overall the program is very easy to use but we still find Adobe After Effects the perfectly idiot proof video editing program.

As far as the interface is concerned the program is really fast, the timeline never lags, video and audio files import almost instantly and the previews never shutter. We’ve found it on par with Final Cut by Apple which is pretty darn fast. The prior mentioned preview function is pretty neat, when you hover your mouse over any video in the media tab it open a small video dialogue playing the video unlike on other editing softwares where you have to open the video in another window to preview then. Another useful feature is how the program renders HD files in lower resolutions when being worked on and converts them back to higher resolutions for the final product. Exactly what does that mean you ask? Well it allows users with slower hardware to get their work done without facing frequent slowdowns.

The effects included in the package are pretty decent, standard effects like image stabilization and noise reduction are helpful as always. We also loved using the chroma key, color correction, masking skins and the excellent text based effects.

There’s one thing that really bugs us about the program: the timeline. Even though it’s pretty quick it gets really crowded once you start applying different effects, adding different audios, etc and to fix that you have to change the height of the tracks constantly, not that much of a problem but it would have been nice to have an option to zoom into the timeline vertically. Another annoying thing with the timeline is that you can only expand and check key frames only one track at a time which simply wastes your time.

TechDeville’s Verdict

MoviePlus X5 is one of the easiest video editors we’ve got our hands on. It’s priced good and very easy to use, what else could you want?.

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