Magix Movie Edit Pro MX Plus review

After years of incremental improvements, video-editing software is currently going through some big changes. It’s all thanks to technologies such as CUDA and OpenCL, which give software applications wider-reaching access to the processor on the graphics card – the GPU. The parallel processing architecture that’s so well suited to drawing 3D worlds in games also happens to be pretty good at decoding and encoding video streams and applying video effects.

Magix’s website lists 17 ways in which this update is faster than its predecessor, including program launch, project loading, GPU acceleration of certain effects and more responsive timeline controls. Top of the list is AVCHD export, which Magix claims is “on average up to 3 times faster… thanks to Nvidia CUDA and AMD Open CL support”.

No time to edit yourself? The new movie templates provide a handy shortcut, but there are only 15 to choose from

Our tests confirmed only some of these claims. Program launch was down from nine to five seconds, and project loading was marginally quicker. Processing a 30-second AVCHD clip for image stabilisation on our Core i7 PC fell from 201 seconds to 22 seconds – just shy of the claimed 10-fold speed boost.

We didn’t experience the three-fold improvement in AVCHD export speed, though. In fact, the new version was slightly slower in our tests. Magix quotes specific tests using a Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz PC to deliver improvements up to 350 per cent, but it seems that our Core i7 processor didn’t benefit from help from the graphics processor for this particular task.

It did no better than the previous version in our standard preview test, either. As before, Movie Edit Pro managed to play three simultaneous AVCHD streams before it started to drop frames, not far off the four streams managed by our current Best Buy, Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum, but a far cry from the 10 streams managed by PowerDirector Ultra.

There’s a new offline render command for sections of the timeline that prove too complex for the software to preview smoothly. Sections requiring help can be picked with a Range tool or left for the software to define, but rendering must be invoked manually, whereupon no further editing is possible until it’s finished. This often took many minutes, and had to be repeated after any further editing of that section. Adobe and Pinnacle’s background rendering functions do the same thing with much less fuss and interruption.