My first impressions of MoviePlus X3 were below average. The box looked professional with everything neatly packaged in it, and while examining the ‘Serif won over 200 awards and accolades’ label, I couldn’t help but feel skepticism towards its ability to produce “professional-quality movies to share with family, friends, customers, or the whole world…” For $67.99, it seemed too good to be true.
Despite my instant dislike, I decided to give it a spin. Surprisingly, installation was a breeze; MoviePlus X3 occupied 119 MB of disk space while the tutorials and TrueType Fonts occupied an extra 241 MB. I was impressed; I love portable or low-space apps.
While MoviePlus installed, I examined the user guide. Once again, I was pleased: it contained a multitude of in-depth details, images and instructions that covered everything from setting up MoviePlus X3 to saving and exporting most types of videos. The user guide was written with the average user in mind, which I think is a big plus for them (Serif). I never read user manuals, but I can spot a good one easily.
On a quad-core 4GB desktop PC, MoviePlus was up and running in less than a minute, excluding a pesky online registration reminder that appears each time the app is launched. Despite that minor annoyance, the loading time was impressive for an app of that size.
To fully test the capabilities of MoviePlus, I imported a HD (1080p) video that was created a few months ago. MoviePlus accepted it without any problems and I was editing in no time…
The nice thing about MoviePlus X3 is the generous amount of transitions, video/audio effects, animations and envelopes that are included with it. There are literally 100+ different “enhancements” that you can add to your footage, not to mention great cut and paste/trim features. After spending an hour on editing, I began previewing my work before exporting.
For some reason, I got a runtime error halfway into the preview. I was forced to quit MoviePlus and restart it. Fortunately, MoviePlus includes a crash recovery feature that allowed me to recover my project and continue as if nothing happened. After an hour or so, I had a finished product with identical quality to the source. I highly recommend MoviePlus X3 to any novice and/or intermediate editors who want to refine their skills!
