Review: Serif Movieplus X3 video editor

Previous versions of Movieplus have been largely well received but it’s tended to be a little unfriendly towards beginners. The latest release tackles that side of things head-on.

A fresh interface lends Movieplus the air of an older brother to Windows XP and Vista’s built-in Movie Maker.

A Storyboard mode has been included this time around, making it much simpler for video-editing newbies to drag and drop clips into the order they require.

A How To pane is also present at all times, so help with specific tasks is only ever a click or two away.

These concessions don’t make the application any less suitable for more adventurous editors, however.

With a single click, Storyboard mode can be traded up to a more complex timeline workspace, where an unlimited number of video and audio tracks are available.

Trimming clips is straightforward, yet accurate, and a selection of powerful effects and transitions is available from an old Adobe-style dropdown palette on the right-hand side of the main window.

Movieplus X3 is compatible with a wide range of video format types and is also HD-Ready, so can import and edit AVCHD files. At the other end of the process, it is capable of exporting straight to iPod and PSP formats as well as provide a means to upload your finished work to Youtube.

However, on the disc-making front, it lags behind the competition in that it can only export to standard DVD. The authoring tools are easy enough to use, but the lack of Blu-ray or even HD-on-DVD options may disqualify the program in the eyes of many more serious videographers.

Unlike many of its competitors, Movieplus is happy to run on a relatively low specification system and comes with none of the bloat that hampers some video-editing products.