Magix Movie Edit Pro 2015 review

Home video producers are spoilt for choice, with seven editing packages vying for their business. Movie Edit Pro hasn’t been our favourite video editing software in the past, but Magix is looking to change that with this latest update.

It’s not lacking in features, with 99 tracks that can accommodate any combination of video, audio and graphic files. Ripple-editing options let the user dictate what happens to clips located downstream on the timeline when earlier ones are edited – a valuable feature for complex projects that’s notably absent from most consumer editors.

Our chief complaint with previous versions has been the unwieldy interface that makes it hard to locate and use features. As such, we were delighted to see a redesigned user interface listed among the new features. Our excitement was short-lived, though; the redesign appears to be purely cosmetic, with a few redesigned and relocated buttons but no change to the sprawling menus and confusingly named features.

Movie Edit Pro is finally an entirely 64-bit application, which bodes well for preview smoothness. However, our hopes were dashed once again. The previous version was able to play seven simultaneous 1080p AVCHD streams on our Core i7 870 test PC with 8GB RAM. Loading the same project in Movie Edit Pro 2015, playback began smoothly but stuttered badly about every ten seconds. We had to reduce the number of stacked video streams to five before smooth playback was re-established.

As with previous version, Movie Edit Pro 2015 comes in three editions. The standard version (without a suffix) costs £60. Movie Edit Pro 2015 Plus adds various additional features including surround sound, custom disc menu design and 3D video support. There’s a NewBlue Titler EX plug-in for designing 3D titles – a welcome addition but confusingly located under the Effects rather Title tab.

^ Multicam mode now supports up to four video streams

It also includes a multi-camera editing mode that’s designed for events that were shot with two or more cameras, simplifying the process of synchronising them and cutting between them. This mode now supports up to four cameras, which is a significant improvement on the two-camera support introduced in Movie Edit Pro 2013. Cyberlink PowerDirector has a similar feature, but we much prefer Magix’s implementation because it integrates simply and neatly with the main timeline controls.

The Plus edition also introduces a new effect for removing fish-eye lens distortions. This is particularly useful for GoPro Hero and other action cameras that have fish-eye lenses. The correction is performed manually rather than using profiles for specific lenses, but it worked well enough for our Hero 3 Black Edition footage. We took the opportunity to test Movie Edit Pro’s stabilisation, but it fell short of the standard of the recently upgraded stabilisation in Adobe Premiere Elements (see Reviews, Shopper 323).

^ Correction for fish-eye lenses should prove useful for action cam footage

Another feature that’s reserved for the Plus edition is proxy editing. This swaps high-definition video for lower-resolution copies to enable smoother previews, returning to the originals for export. It’s an extremely valuable feature for 4K editing, and for HD editing on modest hardware. It’s just a shame it’s not better signposted. This kind of technology should be on by default for 4K footage, or at least offered when importing it. 

This isn’t the only challenge facing people who want to edit 4K video. While the software automatically matches the project settings to imported media, it’s not so careful about matching export settings. Exports to hard disk are at a choice of DVD quality, 720p or 1080p. With no option to customise settings, it looked like 4K exports were impossible. We eventually found a workaround by opting to export at 4K to YouTube, which left a 4K video file in the same folder as our last export to disk. We often complain about other editors’ overly complex export options, but this one goes too far the other way. We weren’t able to export our 2.7K GoPro footage in MPEG-4 format at all, as the drop-down list of Quality settings was mysteriously empty. Exporting as a 1080p MPEG-2 file was possible but the video had peculiar letterboxing problems.

^ Red Giant Knoll Light Factory specialises in lens flares

Movie Edit Pro 2015 Premium costs £99 including VAT and adds a further three plug-ins from Red Giant. Retrograde applies vintage film simulation, Chromatic Glow adds glow effects and Knoll Light Factory adds sophisticated lens flares. All three are capable of excellent results but they don’t integrate particularly well with the host application, with parameters presented as a purely text-based list. They’re worth the extra £20, but bear in mind that these extras usually change from one version to the next, so it might be tricky to reopen old projects that use these plug-ins after upgrades and reinstallations.

^ Turn digital video into cinefilm footage with the Red Giant Retrograde plug-in

Once again, Movie Edit Pro scores better for quantity than for quality. However, there’s enough here to keep it in the running, such as its ripple editing options, 99 tracks and accomplished multi-cam editing. It’s a solid choice for those who want lots of features to experiment and don’t mind putting up with a few quirks.