Home video editing makes most people think of Adobe, Ulead or Pinnacle, but there's a home-grown product, from just outside Nottingham, which should also be in the frame. Serif's MoviePlus 5 does most of what other home video editors do, but with a few extras of its own.

MoviePlus 5 uses a well-designed editing screen with a timeline at the top and a preview screen in the middle below that. The screen is flanked on the left by a file selector, complete with thumbnails of any video files that play through when you mouse over them. On the right is a properties panel for the selected video, audio or title channel and a pair of audio level meters.

There's no storyboard view in MoviePlus, but useful facilities like the ability to group together video, audio and text channels and handle them as one make the timeline view particularly versatile. You can also have an unlimited number of channels in any video project.

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Other parts of the program, such as video import or DVD menu design, come up as pop-up panels over the editing screen. MoviePlus 5 introduces a Wizard-driven front-end editor for DVD menus, with a lot of pre-designed backdrops and freedom to build menu buttons and text wherever you want on the screen.

All the major video packages are heralding High Definition (HD) video support as a major new feature and Serif calls on the HDV format to compress HD video via MPEG-2. You're going to need a fairly powerful system to handle this type of file, though, or wait a good while for final rendering of your video.

Already pretty versatile in the video formats it can handle, MoviePlus 5 adds Quicktime import and export to the list. This is important for creating videos for iPods and other handheld devices which use Apple's video format.

MoviePlus 5 is unusually strong on stills editing. You can pan and zoom around a high resolution image and place masks over it using QuickShapes, a technology borrowed from PagePlus and DrawPlus. These adjustable, simple, geometric shapes are a useful creative tool for rostrum-camera-style effects.

Serif supports stereo sound, which can be panned around the sound stage, but there's no support for Dolby Digital sound. In contrast, Adobe's Premiere Elements 2 provides Dolby stereo and Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus supports Dolby 5.1 multi-channel.

Other additions in MoviePlus 5 include 3D transition effects, extra filters like 3D bump map and 3D lighting, and TV preview, which enables you to play your edited video on your TV before burning it to DVD or CD.

While MoviePlus may not have all the pizzazz of some of its zappier rivals, it does the job in a straightforward and workmanlike way. Its handling of rostrum-camera-style stills work is a useful extra, though it doesn't fully compensate for some of the sexier video effects, like anti-shake, or Dolby sound, which aren't provided.