Serif Movie Plus X5

With Movie Plus X5, Serif skips a whole release (there's no X4) to bring its video-editing program into line with the rest of its X5-branded product range.

It has taken the opportunity to at the same time to remake the design and add some new features.

There are technical advances such as the ability to create Blu-ray discs, and better support for high-definition (HD) video, and functional advances, including improvements to the way the storyboard works and more precise positioning for captions and special effects in videos.

Movie Plus is an impressive video-editing program that can import video from a file, disc or your video camera, detect scenes (which makes it easier to compose a finished movie quickly) and then assemble them. Like many video editors it gives the user the choice of editing on a storyboard (good for simple productions) or a timeline (better for more complicated movies).

Finished films can then be burned to disc, including DVD, Blu ray, VCD and AVCHD (which can store a short HD film on a DVD, rather than a Blu-ray disc). Discs come complete with chapters and multi-level menus, and alternatively finished movies can be sent directly to iTunes (for copying to an iPad, iPhone or iPod) or Youtube.

The new noise-reduction and image-stabilisation features worked well – the former removes the speckling that can result from low-light shooting, while the latter helps to counteract camera shake. The multi-trim function really speeds up editing, allowing users to mark multiple parts of a clip quickly and then combine them into a single new scene.

Elsewhere, visual guides help to position text more precisely and control the program's sophisticated video effects – for example, picture-in-picture, perspective and scaling.

There are various smaller improvements too, particularly to the storyboard and timeline where it's now possible to place audio with more finesse, as well as linking overlays like titles and credits to specific sections of video or associating related clips into groups that stay together during editing.

As with many powerful products of this kind, Movie Plus can be hard to understand at times. The re-designed Media, Galleries and Properties sections, which include more features, are harder to navigate than before, and anyone coming from the simplistic Windows Movie Maker or Apple iMovie will find some of the processes and jargon (CG Clips, Envelopes - not the paper kind) frustrating at first.

Against that, the help file is excellent and dug us out of every hole. For standard (rather than high definition) video it's also faster than we were expecting, even on a five-year-old computer. But anyone wanting to take advantage of the HD features will need a more powerful PC.