Serif Movieplus 4

The release of Adobe's Premiere Elements last year gave the video-editing market a shake-up, challenging vendors of other entry-level packages to get their acts together. Serif's response has been to give Movieplus a major upgrade, overhauling most aspects of the program as well as adding a number of powerful new features.

One of the main areas of improvement is the redesigned interface, although it's probably best described as functional rather than elegant. It looks a bit crowded at times, being split into a series of separate panels and a toolbar crammed with unfamiliar icons.

The Timeline panel occupies the top half of the screen, and is where you arrange your audio and video clips in a series of horizontal tracks. Unlike some low-cost editors, Movieplus allows you to create an unlimited number of tracks, so you can experiment with complex multi-track edits.

The bottom half of the screen contains three smaller panels. Chief among these is the Explorer, a browser that allows you to locate audio, video or graphics files stored on your hard disk. Most video editors provide a similar feature for sorting through your media, but we like the clever preview option that Movieplus provides here. You can play any audio or video clip within the Explorer simply by placing your mouse over it. This makes it easy to quickly preview multiple clips, and you can then get straight down to editing by dragging and dropping clips into the Timeline.

You can also preview the automatic scene detection by clicking the Show/Hide Scene button. This opens a smaller window that shows your chosen clip split into scenes, allowing you to choose one specific scene and then drop that straight onto the Timeline. It's a clever and very efficient way of handling audio and video. Underneath the Explorer is a series of small tabs for accessing various special effects and transitions, and you can preview these in a similar fashion by pointing the mouse at them.

Next to the Explorer is a larger Preview window that lets you view your edited project. The third panel is the Properties pane, which provides detailed information about each clip and can be used to alter settings such as transparency and playback speed.

This interface arrangement initially seems a little odd, since most video editors put their timeline at the bottom of the screen, and many people will instinctively look at the upper half of the screen to preview their clips. However, there's no law that says all video-editing programs have to work the same way, so this is more of an oddity than a major weakness.

Most of the other main features can be found in the Timeline window. The toolbar running across the top of it allows you to activate features such as the timesaving 'auto-transition' option, which automatically inserts a transition whenever you make two clips overlap. Double-clicking on any video track will also cause the track to expand, displaying additional features, such as the 'key frame' controls.

Key frames are a very powerful tool, and aren't usually found in low-cost editors such as this, so Movieplus certainly gets points for providing good value for money. Key frames allow you to modify various properties over time, perhaps creating a customised fade effect by setting key frames at specific times and then making the video clip fade by different amounts at each one. You can also produce animation or pans by using key frames to alter the size or position of a video clip, or of a graphic object that has been superimposed over your footage.

Unfortunately, the key frame features aren't explained particularly well, either by the program's manual, or its online Help files. The same thing applies to other powerful features such as the picture-in-picture effects and the ability to create animated titles. So while Movieplus 4 provides a great deal of editing power at a very competitive price, Serif could still do a bit more to make that power accessible to new users.

System requirements:

• Windows 98 SE or later
• 500MHz processor
• 128MB of Ram
• 400MB hard disk
• DV camcorder or analogue video capture capability