Picture the scene. It's late at night and you're hunched over your keyboard, trying your amateur hand at movie producing. Smoke drifts lazily from a lit but untouched, half-ashen cigarette as you lovingly tinker with the central transitional frame of the third scene... "And the stomach explodes... now... hmm, where did I save that Alien GIF?"

So we exaggerate. Maybe you won't be recreating sci-fi blockbusters with MovieShop Deluxe, but it does give the average, non-techie PC user a fair crack at editing and producing home movies, with various basic special effects bolted on. The MovieShop Deluxe film editing philosophy is empirical by nature; it keeps matters commendably simple and relatively user-friendly.

You can jump straight in, whipping a couple of example movies off the disc and following a basic tutorial which shows you how to splice video clips together, edit sound out, add soundtracks, titles and so forth. It stops short of the more complex stuff that MovieShop Deluxe can churn out, which is left for explanation in the hefty instruction manual.

However, the program really is easy to use on a basic level. Within minutes you'll have uploaded a movie and soundtrack into it and you'll be tinkering with timelines, fades (including screen wipes, diffusions, spins; there are 42 in total), filters (to soften or turn your film into sepia; 10 are provided) and superimposed text.

Everything is managed via the Timeline menu, which displays your clips in time sequence, and you can easily stretch and rearrange these clips. The Editor adds appropriate effects while the Storyboard menu gives an overall view of your creation, separated into ten different layers.

Using all ten layers you can actually put some fairly involved movies together, including complexities like picture-in-picture effects, although this is where beginners can get in over their depth. Repositioning elements on the timeline with so many layers can take some thought and planning, and should you make a wrong move it can require a lot of correction. Of course, the simple answer is to save regularly before each major tinker.

Naturally it's necessary to get your home movies onto your hard drive in order to edit them, but if you're lucky enough to have a DV camcorder and a PC with a Firewire port, you can stream your tapes directly into the program, which is pretty smart. And you can export the edited results back to the camcorder too.

MovieShop Deluxe also allows you to burn your movies onto CD or DVD and you can export your film at pretty much any size or resolution, so there's a great range of options here. It's also worth mentioning that the disc comes complete with 300 sample images, 200 sound effects and 50 video clips.

Verdict
MovieShop Deluxe has a simple drag-and-drop interface and it's very easy to get to grips with, which is great for beginners to the video editing field. At the same time it has some depth to it, with ten different editing layers, although it can get a little fiddly when you start to explore the program's limits. For the price, this is a worthy buy indeed and a great introduction to home movie editing.

Company: Mindscape

Contact: 01293 651300

Tags: film editing video clip special effect united states arts and entertainment arts movies