It's all very slick, and even the most timid technophobe could get to grips with it. Once you're done with that, you can also make DVD menus to tie the whole package together. Once you've edited all your footage together, you can add titles, which, of course, you'll want to put in yellow, on a black background. If becoming George Lucas is something you aspire to, then there's a decent chroma key feature included too, so you can create virtual worlds and then superimpose your actors on them.

The only person ever to have successfully pulled off such effects is George Lucas, and, let's be frank, it eventually drove him to produce Jar Jar Binks, so no good can come from it. There's no better way to make your videos look amateurish than by using a variety of horrendous cross-fades. Of course, the more data you're dealing with, the harder it will be for your PC to keep up, so make sure you've got plenty of memory and a decent processor.Īs you would expect, there are tonnes of transitions and effects included.

We took some test material from a Canon EOS 500D and the software seemed more than happy to deal with it. We were surprised to learn that X3 can cope with high-definition video too. X3 even preserved our Dolby Digital stereo soundtrack. We were up and running in no time at all, editing video clips copied off our SD card from a JVC camcorder. Video editing is fairly tricky for computers to handle because of the huge amounts of data being shifted about, so the fact it didn't crash is no mean feat. Importing video is dead easy, and, when we were using it, the application didn't crash once in either Vista or the Windows 7 release candidate. The simplicity with which X3 operates is excellent. The second method is the full-on time-line mode, whereby you bring clips in and trim them as needed. This is great if you're just putting together a basic video and your footage doesn't need any hard-core editing. The first is to simply drag clips into sequence. X3 uses a familiar format, with a large video window showing you the clip you're currently working with. X3 is available now, costs £60 and is available to buy on a disc or as a download. With X3, however, Serif aims to provide something easy to use and cheap, and we think the company might have pulled it off. The problem with most video-editing packages is that they are either ludicrously expensive or nearly impossible to use, or, in many cases, both.

Serif drawplus x3