Serif MoviePlus X6 review

Another complaint we had with previous versions was the uninspiring effects, but Serif has made some advances here. The improved colour correction takes its inspiration from Adobe Lightroom, with controls for brightening shadows, darkening highlights and a Clarity control that falls somewhere between contrast and sharpening to give extremely punchy tones.

The new 3D Transform effect moves, rotates and animates video clips on three axes, with handles overlaid onto the preview for intuitive control. It’s available in addition to the existing 2D Transform controls, and video titles have an additional set of 2D Transform controls. This can get pretty confusing, but with careful use it’s possible to create polished animations. It would be even more powerful with individual keyframe lanes for each parameter, though – MoviePlus only offers keyframe lanes per effect, so attempting to animate certain combinations of parameters independently, such as scale and rotation, can cause problems. Meanwhile, there are still no distortion effects such as deform or wave – the effects library remains a little uninspiring.

QuickMovie is instant-results editing, but the results are predictably clumsy

Other new features include a batch converter function, direct uploads to Facebook and export templates for iPhone, iPad and various other devices. Also new is QuickMovie Studio, which edits video clips together based on themed templates. It’s a common feature among consumer video editors, but while most chop clips up into garbled nonsense, QuickMovie goes to the opposite extreme and uses the selected clips in their entirety, giving finished videos an extremely slow pace.

There’s further room for improvement among the effects, and we’re still waiting for a vertical zoom control to show more tracks on the timeline – the individual track minimise buttons are no substitute. However, MoviePlus X6 handles core editing tasks with aplomb, and it excels in its ability to handle demanding formats and complex edits on relatively modest hardware. Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum narrowly holds on to the top spot for those with fast PCs, but for editing HD on laptops and slower desktop PCs, MoviePlus is our top recommendation.