Movavi’s goal for its video editing software is to enable simple movie and clip creation, avoiding the sometimes needless complexity of the competition. That sounds great, but does it pan out in practice? After all, creating compelling videos often requires lots of advanced tools and capabilities. You also want a program that’s responsive and renders the final product quickly. The short answer? Yes. Movavi Video Editor Plus is one of the best we’ve seen at packing a lot of capability into an unintimidating interface.
How Much Does Movavi Video Editor Plus Cost?
You can get Movavi Video Editor Plus for a one-time payment of $59.95, or as part of a suite subscription that includes other Movavi applications. It’s a good deal, compared with the going rate of $99 to $129 for the likes of Adobe Premiere Elements and CyberLink PowerDirector. The Movavi Video Suite adds a format converter, screen recording, and a photo editor, for $79.95 per year or a one-time payment of $199.95. The Movavi Unlimited plan ($129.95 per year or a one-time cost of $259.95) adds photo and PDF editing.
Movavi runs on both macOS (version 10.10 and later) and Windows (from XP to 10). It’s available in the Mac App Store but not the Microsoft Store, unfortunately.
In a good harbinger for performance, Movavi installs about as quickly as a web browser and takes up a very reasonable 280MB of hard drive space. Most consumer video editing software requires more than a gigabyte of storage these days. See the Performance section below for the full specs.
As soon as you start the app, the upsells appear, with Effect Packs on offer, ranging in price from $7.95 to $39.95. You could, of course, just buy the whole lot with the Unlimited subscription plan. The same window that shows these ads does have useful tutorial videos, however. Fortunately, this popup only appeared the first time I ran the program, though a Notification bell icon at the bottom-right corner of the program window did lead to this promotional dialog on subsequent runs.
A Pleasing Interface
Movavi Video Editor Plus is refreshingly uncomplicated and labels every element clearly. Buttons down the left rail move you between modes for Importing, Filters, Transitions, Titles, Stickers, and more. The last group includes important features like Color Adjustments, Crop and Rotate, Pan and Zoom, Stabilization, Slow Motion, and Chroma Keying. I’d put those above Stickers (fun as they are) if I were designing the program.
The Import mode includes sections not only for importing, but also the traditional Media bin that includes all project content, as well as for sounds, music, sample videos, backgrounds, and effect packages.
The main section layout of the program resembles that of most video editing software, with a source box at top left, timeline tracks along the full width of the bottom half of the window, and a preview player at top right. You can undock only the video preview panel, but the relative size of the other panels is adjustable.
Above the timeline, which doesn’t limit the number of tracks you can add, you see buttons for Split, Rotate, Crop, Color Adjustments, Clip Properties, Markers, Record Video, and Record Audio.
You can stop and start playback with the spacebar and rescale the timeline with the mouse wheel + Ctrl key. Movavi supports some keyboard shortcuts, though not the standard pro J, K, and L for playback and I and O for in and out edits.
The Undo feature is impressive in that it works between sessions. This means I can close a project and still undo previous actions the next time I open it.
Starting a Project
You start your video project by tapping the Add Files button. Alternatively, you can simply drag media from File Explorer or Finder. After you add the first media, a tutorial overlay shows what the parts of the interface are for. To add a clip to the timeline, simply double-click it. You can also drag it, or choose Add to current position, beginning, end, or after current clip from a right-click menu—very convenient.
Movavi supports most video common file formats; I had no trouble importing the H.265 content newer iPhones can shoot. You can also use its integrated video capture utility to record from a connected webcam or camera.
One feature vloggers and YouTubers should appreciate is Intro mode. This lets you create preset sequences to use at the start of all your videos for channel consistency.
Pros may miss the ability to pre-trim clips before you drop them into the timeline, but that shouldn’t bother hobbyists. The same goes for trimming options—you don’t get options like slip, slide, and roll—it’s simply trimming ends or splitting clips. Again, this isn’t likely to annoy amateurs. You trim clips on the timeline by dragging their edges in, which immediately snaps the new, shorter clip to its neighbor on the timeline.
Movavi offers a large selection of cool Transitions, with in-app purchases of more available. There are two ways to work with transitions: One is to switch to Transition mode, where you see thumbnails showing the transition effects in action. You can also click the Transitions button above the timeline to choose a transition from a dropdown list on the Transition Effects page, which also houses the Pan and Zoom features.
You can apply random transitions throughout the project, a specific transition for all clip joins, or choose exactly which transition is applied to the selected clip. You can also set the duration, and one nice thing for amateurs is that the program never scolds you about not having enough overlapping footage—it just creates a good-looking transition with what’s on your timeline. One oddity, however, is that the interface lets you select more than one transition, so you need to uncheck all but the one you want to apply to a specific edit.
Correcting and Enhancing Videos
Movavi’s Filters mode lets you apply Adjustments, Blur, Color filters, Vignettes and more effects. The program provides a good selection of sample video and audio, most of which it downloads after you click on them. A search box lets you find any of the effects or transitions.
The real fun starts in the More Tools section (which changes to All Tools when you enter it). Here, you get to the Overlays, Stabilization, Animation, Chroma Key, and Audio tools. The Animation page’s Advanced tab is where you find the program’s only keyframe editing option, which is fine. Keyframe editing, which let you mark exactly where on the timeline an effect should start and stop, is limited to size, position, opacity, and rotation, but that’s a plus for the program’s ease of use objective. On the other hand, those who want total control over effects and positions should look to PowerDirector or Pinnacle Studio, which let you time every effect and edit you apply with keyframes.
The Overlay section lets you apply picture-in-picture effects with video clips that overlap on the timeline in separate tracks. You don’t get all the video collage templates that some other software offers, but you do get a few, and you can resize and position the pictures to taste. A plus is the guide that appears when your inner picture is centered either horizontally or vertically.
The Stabilization tool lets you set the accuracy and shaking parameters, and then preview the results. I was impressed with its effectiveness on a test clip; even a severe shake was smoothed out and the overall feel of the video was calmer than the original.
Speed editing happens in two places: The Clip Properties panel has a Speed slider that lets you adjust the clip speed from 10% to 1,000%. The Slow Motion option simply lets you reduce the speed. Though it’s not on either of these panels, there is a Freeze-Frame effect you can add by right clicking with the cursor on a clip in the timeline and choosing Insert Freeze Frame. Reversing playback is also a possibility on the Clip Properties panel.
Motion Tracking takes place not only in the Highlight and Conceal section of All Tools, but you can use it for text and stickers as well. First, you choose a mask that can be either a black shape or a blurred shape. You then have choices for feathering, opacity, and whether you want the shape to appear as an outline. Then comes the tracking, which can be either Quick or Precise. The latter wasn’t that slow in my testing, and it actually stayed with the tracked subject after she passed behind a telephone pole.
The Chroma Key tool of course starts with green as the key, but a dropper lets you use any background color in the shot. You can also adjust the tolerance, noise, edges, and opacity. It works, but not as well as some competitors. Corel VideoStudio, for example, lets you choose more than one background color to key out.
Instant Movies
Movavi’s Montage Wizard lets you throw some media at the program and have it build a movie for you automatically, complete with a background soundtrack. You start by choosing Create Quick Video and adding your media. Then, you get a selection of templates like Family, Memories, and Travel. You see a preview of the template’s look and feel before you have to decide on using it. The last step is to choose the music mood you’re looking for before you can preview your video.
The tool adds striking titles to the start and end of the movie, and though it’s not very customizable, it does a decent job for the least amount of effort. It can even fit the music to your content and fill the black side bars that result from shooting with a smartphone in portrait orientation. After creating the project, you can edit the creation in the full editor, save it as-is, or upload it to YouTube or Vimeo.
Titles and Text
You get a plentiful choice of both tasteful and sassy titles, many with animation. As noted above, you can motion-track titles. Resizing them and moving them around the preview screen thankfully uses WYSIWYG—something not all editors are capable of. Of course, you get a wealth of font and color choices, and you can choose a background color and outline (aka stroke). Once you get a title looking to your taste, you may save it as a preset. Some of the titles sport basic animations like flyby and zoom.
Audio
A line on the timeline track lets you lower or raise clip volume—a capability Adobe Premiere Rush lacks. You expand the Audio Editing entry in All Tools to get to the relevant controls. Impressively, there’s a Synchronization option that lets you shoot from two different cameras—the first step towards multicam editing, which Movavi lacks. There’s also an equalizer and nine effects, including Echo, Muffled, Telephone, and Robot. Other programs like Adobe Premiere Pro let you simulate different acoustic environments like those of a cathedral or stadium. Finally, Movavi includes a Beat Detect feature that adds markers at beat points to help you place edits and effects.
Performance
Movavi did pause occasionally when I was working with four-clip picture-in-picture content, but it was responsive on the whole for normal editing. It was also stable: I experienced no crashes at all while working with it—something that’s unfortunately rare in the video-editing software world, even with apps from big companies like Apple, whose Final Cut software used to crash frequently.
Movavi uses graphics hardware acceleration with all three major GPUs: Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. It also creates proxies for high-resolution content for faster editing. In my video project rendering text, the program turned in decent, if not leading numbers. For the test, I create a five-minute movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to 1080p30 MPEG-4 at 15Mbps, H.264 High Profile. I ran the test three times and took the geometric mean (which minimizes the effect of outliers). I tested on a PC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR5 RAM.
As you can see from the graph above, Movavi came in at 2:33 (min:sec), which is very reasonable, if not record-breaking.
Movavi on the Mac
The Apple macOS version of Movavi Video Editor Plus has feature-parity with the Windows version, and happily it’s available on the Mac App Store, to ease installation, updating, and use on multiple computers. Movavi’s system requirements state that the software requires an Intel-based Mac, but I had to test on an M1-based MacBook Air, since my Intel-based MacBook Pro succumbed to a fatal error while running Final Cut Pro. The program looked the same as on Windows, but there was an issue with previewing any video content aside from that shot on an iPhone. In Movavi on the M1-based Mac, video previews became still images, aside from content shot on the iPhone. The audio played normally, but I was unable to render the test project. A Movavi rep told me that M1 native support would come “in a while,” and I’ll update this review with testing results once the update drops.
Moving Pictures With Movavi?
I really enjoyed using Movavi Video Editor Plus for testing during this review and recommend it for consumers who want to create fun, good-looking video productions. Unlike many consumer video editors, it’s not intimidating and overloaded with options, yet still offers most of the advanced techniques people want, including chroma keying, transitions, title text, picture-in-picture, music and audio editing, and even motion tracking. It’s not the fastest at rendering projects and occasionally presents upsells and in-app offers, but those aren’t major drawbacks.
For the most power and performance in video editing software, check out or Editors’ Choice winners, CyberLink PowerDirector and Corel VideoStudio Pro. On the Mac, for easy editing stick with iMovie, and for advanced work, look to Final Cut Pro.
