Excuse the pun, but there’s a new Serif in town. The new MoviePlus is bigger, stronger and faster than its predecessor, and it’s challenging Adobe, Pinnacle and Sony at the budget end of the video-editing market.

The most impressive thing about this program is its power. Unlike Adobe and Sony, Serif doesn’t have a high-end video program, so it doesn’t have to hold any technology back; it can cram it all into this cheap offering. For example, MoviePlus 4 gives you unlimited video and audio tracks, so you’re only constrained by what your CPU can handle. More impressively perhaps, its rendering engine quickly performs complicated calculations so that you can view detailed effects and transitions in real-time. Even picture-in-picture motion is played seamlessly as you construct it.

As its price suggests, this package is entry-level, so it’s also important that it does the basics properly. To that end, Serif has introduced automatic scene detection into its capture facility, and has ‘scrubbing’ (flying back and forth through footage) within timeline mode. Both of these features are common- place in Studio and Premiere, so it was important that MoviePlus caught up.

One area where this program actually out-performs Premiere Elements is audio. Unlike in Adobe’s software, where even volume control can be fiddly, the windows for effects such as gain and balance can be re-sized, so you can work with far more precision. This is typical of an interface that is completely customisable; even the preview window can be dragged to encompass the entire screen. However, there is one major drawback: the DVD authoring provision. The bundled Sonic MyDVD utility is tidy, but we would much rather have a tool built into the main interface, as with Sony Vegas or Pinnacle Studio. There will be times where you need to go backwards and forwards between the two programs, which can be time-consuming and frustrating.

MoviePlus sits most closely to Vegas in that video-editing middleground. If you’re finding the limitations of Premiere Elements frustrating, but aren’t ready for the complications and expense of a £400 package, this is a tremendous purchase. However, Vegas may just have the edge, thanks to a superior authoring element.