Serif MoviePlus Starter Edition download review

Serif MoviePlus Starter Edition is a video-editing program that's free to downloaded and use. It is capable of some fairly complicated edits but has some restrictions compared to the full version of the software.

There is an option to buy a codec pack for £5 that allows the import and export of a wider selection of file formats. It includes importing DV, MPEG1, MPEG2 and MP4 files and exporting MPEG2 and Quicktime AAC.

Read more: Video editing

You will need to sign up for a free account with Serif and will then see the download link and your license key. The key will also be emailed to you.

Installation is simple and includes the Serif browser Toolbar should you choose to install it. A reboot is required, although we found in testing that we had to ignore the call for a reboot in order to progress with the installation.

You can choose between PAL and NTSC to make sure that finished videos play properly on television.

The editor includes guidelines as well as the TV safe zone. Guidelines can be moved around the screen so you can make sure that different elements are always lined up.

The video can be edited either in the traditional timeline view or as a storyboard. The former is more powerful but the storyboard view is useful when planning how to arrange videos.

We were impressed that it can include a couple of picture-in-picture videos

The How To pane is useful and includes a task list of common jobs that make up editing a video. The Media pane provides a place to collect all the videos to be included in a project before starting to edit anything.

Finished videos can be exported to a file or uploaded to YouTube. As suggested by the offer of the codec pack, the available formats is a little limited, Quicktime MOV, AVI or Windows Media WMV.

We have found WMV to be a good quality video format although you might have problems exporting it to some non Windows devices. A utility such as Freemake Video Converter will solve that problem. It offers YouTube exporting in resolutions up to 1080p so quality shouldn't suffer.