Magix Movie Edit Pro 2016 Premium review – great video stabilisation

It can’t be easy being the software product manager that’s charged with the task of producing a new version every year. Video editing software needs to keep up with the latest video standards, but in most other respects the needs of the average user don’t change much from year to year. Support for the latest standards don’t make for an enticing upgrade, though, and people expect must-have new features with each iteration.

Magix is off to a good start by bundling proDAD Mercalli v4 with this latest version of Movie Edit Pro Premium. This is the creme de la creme of video stabilisation, and normally retails at £179. It offers detailed control over processing, with the ability to correct on various axes of motion and apply lens distortion correction from a library of presets for popular action-cams from GoPro, DJI and many others.

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This version of Mercalli v4 only works as a plug-in inside Movie Edit Pro, and it’s a little frustrating that the pop-up editor must be closed in order to preview the results. Still, it’s a small sacrifice in order to access such high quality video stabilisation at this price. A bigger concern is that when right-clicking a video file and selecting Image Stabilisation, it offers the choice of Magix’s own stabilisation algorithm or Mercalli v2, which is also lurking in the list of video effects. Mercalli v4 is available via the Effects tab, but there’s a high chance that users will never find it.^ It’s great to have the powerful Mercalli v4 video stabilisation included with a consumer video editor 

The Title tab includes some new templates that are unusually tasteful and sophisticated for consumer editing software. Some are simple animations, such as subtle zooms and fades, while others incorporate animated graphic elements. The latter appear on the timeline as three grouped objects – one for the text, another for the graphics and a third as a mask for the graphics so the video appears behind the titles object. It’s a little messy but it allows the various elements to be ungrouped and edited individually if necessary. The animations for the text elements are applied using the software’s standard Fade and Size/Position tools, so they can be edited to your heart’s content.

I don’t often get excited about transitions, as anything other than dissolves and fade to black tends to look gimmicky. However, the new blur-based transitions are actually pretty good, using animated linear and radial blurs to segue from one clip to another. There’s clearly some GPU acceleration going on, as these complex blur effects played back smoothly.^ The blur-based transitions and animated titles templates are unusually stylish

It wasn’t entirely plain sailing, though. These transitions have a fixed duration, and applying them to an existing transition changed the length of the transition. Depending on the selected ripple editing setting, this caused objects on other tracks to become out of sync. It sometimes made titles objects on other tracks mysteriously jump to a different track, and in some cases they disappeared entirely.