Magix has been a leader in audiovisual media software for more than two decades, notably for its industry-standard Sequoia audio editing software. Its Movie Edit Pro enthusiast-level video editing software competes with software from Adobe and CyberLink, and it even boasts support for 360-degree and 4K content. For the 2021 edition, Magix gets vertical video formats (as commonly used in social story posts), social media templates, high-DPI monitor support, 8K editing, NewBlue Filters 5 effects, and an updated Start dialog. These join a full stable of features, such as stabilization, motion tracking, action-cam templates, beat-based editing, and an in-app plug-in store. It’s a worthy upgrade, but our Editors’ choice winner PowerDirector has more features, is easier to use, and is far faster at rendering output.
How Much Does Magix Movie Edit Pro Cost?
Magix’s video editing software is available at three levels: the standard Movie Edit Pro ($69.99 list), Plus ($99.99), and Premium ($129.99, the version reviewed here). Those are official list prices, but they’re often discounted online. The standard edition is surprisingly capable, with 64-bit operation, support for 4K content, and lots of effects. But it lacks real-time preview, multicam, stereo 3D recording, Movie Looks effects, screen capture, secondary color correction, beat-based editing, video proxy, 360-degree support, and several premium effects.
The Plus edition increases the track limit to 200 from Standard’s 32 and adds multicam and 360-degree editing, more effects, and more audio tools. To all that, Premium adds NewBlue Filters 5 Ultimate and Cinema LUTs Mystic effects. For the real pros, Magix offers Video Pro ($399), which offers professional-level capabilities such as three- and four-point editing, three-way color correction, broadcast-quality sound editing, and extended format support.
Free 30-day trial versions are available for all versions, but you’re limited to 3 minutes of output per project and the free versions lacks a lot of tools found in the paid versions, including most templates. Finally, the Movie Edit Touch app for Windows 10 and Android expands the product’s reach.
Movie Edit Pro requires Windows 7 through 10, a 2.4GHz processor or better, 4GB RAM, graphics hardware with 512MB VRAM and DirectX 11 support, and a minimum of 2GB hard drive space. To install the software, you first download a small stub installation app, and you get a choice of also installing Music Maker. The stub in turn downloads the 800MB video editing program and the music software. You must register the software with your contact information before you can start using it.
Video Editing Interface
On first running the program, you see the Create Project window, in which you can specify resolution, frame rate, file location, and other basic settings. The company has added Social Media formats here, including square and vertical 9:16. You now only see the “Create proxy files” option if you open the movie settings dialog later; this is a good choice for speeding up editing actions.
Magix Movie Edit Pro’s interface presents flat-style button icons for all the effect types, with gray borders and a near-black editing area. It’s an attractive, clean-looking interface. Unlike most video programs, Movie Edit Pro puts its video preview panel at top left, with the content and effect source panel to its right. The source panel has tabs at top for Import, Effects, Templates, Audio, and Store. Except for Import, which shows your content folders, each of these opens colored tiles for included effects and media. There’s a search bar, but it doesn’t work with the Store tab.
As in all the competition, the multitrack timeline takes up the full window width below the other panels. The timeline defaults to a storyboard view, but buttons at its top right let you switch to standard timeline view, as well as to a thumbnail view of your clips and Multicam mode.
You can resize and even undock the panels and move them around to your taste. Clear Undo and Redo buttons sit above the timeline, with Mouse and Ripple mode choices. The source section has tabs for Effects, Templates, Audio, and Store, as well as Import (which is really just a media source view). There’s a search bar in this panel, but it doesn’t work within Effect sections. You can’t, for example, search for the specific shape or direction you want for a wipe or blur.
There’s not a lot of guidance inside the program to get you started, though there is a website with tutorial videos. There are no in-app guided edit tutorials like those of Adobe Premiere Elements, but there is a sample video project to show off the program’s possibilities like that offered in Pinnacle Studio. Note that this and many movie templates are only available in the paid version, not in the free trial version.
Unlike Adobe Premiere Elements and Pinnacle Studio, Magix doesn’t use top-level mode buttons to switch among importing and organizing content, editing, and outputting. There are buttons at top left to switch among editing, burning disc projects, and uploading. Noticeably missing is an Import or Organize mode. Like Apple Final Cut Pro X, Magix Movie Edit lets you include multiple movie sequences within a project. Tabs above the timeline let you switch among them, and as noted at the outset, a new menu option lets you add, remove, or merge these project movies.
Working With the Timeline
Magix doesn’t have a clear Import procedure. The Import tab in the source panel simply shows the disk folder tree. There’s no Import menu option like you’ll find in every other video editing program (and there’s no File Close menu option either). The program doesn’t have any organization tools, such as tagging, let alone the auto-tagging you find in some products. You can, however, create a new folder in Windows that will show up under the Media entry in the Import tab, as long as you right-click it and choose Add link. An Android app called Camera MX lets you transfer from your phone over Wi-Fi. Test video clips from my iPhone 4K video still display upside down, something I’ve run into previously with PowerDirector. You can use the rotation tool to fix this, but it would be nice not to have to.
Dragging and dropping clips around the timeline feels snappy, and it’s a cinch to move back and forth in the timeline or adjust its time scale with the mouse wheel. Hover the mouse cursor over any unfamiliar interface element, and a helpful tooltip fills you in on its function. One minor annoyance is that you can’t filter the source panel to display just video or just photos, as you can in most competing software. Another odd thing about the timeline is that, if you play your movie, it keeps playing past any content in the tracks, so if you leave it unattended, you could find yourself far to the right of your video clips.
A small dropdown button at the track head lets you add, delete, and move tracks. If you enlarge the track head and click on it anywhere other than its buttons, you can name the track. This is useful for purposes like designating a track as your main movie, b-roll, effects, soundtrack, and so on. This capability isn’t obvious, though; many users may miss it.
The Active Destination Track lets you click on a track header to give it focus, and when you drop a clip from your source with the insert button, the clip lands in the selected track exactly at the playhead position. This is something PowerDirector also does, but that program handles the situation better when there’s already content at the target location, asking whether you want to overwrite, insert, or replace the existing clip. When Magix encounters a track location that already contains media, it simply adds the new material to the end of the current track. Pinnacle Studio offers even more control in this area, with its 3- and 4-point editing tools.
The storyboard view of your movie’s clips offers more than most competitors’ equivalents. Icons for text, sound volume, and transitions let you perform those actions. Frustratingly, however, I could not drag clip tiles to reposition them in the movie in storyboard view. It’s easy to do this in timeline view, however. Moving around in and zooming the timeline seems natural using the mouse wheel. You can also easily drag and drop clips to different tracks and positions, but there’s no editing mode that lets you move a clip in front of another while moving the second clip to the right. When you move a clip it simply covers over the existing clip. I wish the video preview pane had an in-place pause button, however, since hitting stop also takes you to the beginning of the clip.
The preview window shows the time value for the play-head position and total clip time. You can easily switch between previewing the current source clip and the movie project using arrow icons in the source thumbnails. The keyboard arrow keys let you advance one frame at a time, though there’s no on-screen button for this. An interesting difference from most other programs is the tab bar above the timeline, which lets you have multiple movies open at once.
Easy Digital Movies
Magix’s templates resemble iTunes’ Trailers, but to get them you have to go to Help > Download Extra Content, which amounts to several gigabytes. Many templates cost extra, as do some other effects like title animations and background music. To use templates, you fill placeholder thumbnails, which show descriptive diagrams of what should go in them. A panel on the right describes the desired content, such as Action, Close-Up, and Extreme Long Shot. There are 30 holes to fill in the Blockbuster template. Xs appear in the placeholder thumbnails, but you can’t delete shot spaces you don’t want.
Using this template added dramatic music timed to scene changes and added titles in my testing, but it wasn’t as well thought out shot-wise as Premiere Elements’ similar feature. Magix doesn’t let you edit the content during this building process, even to crop or rotate. Once you move a template project to the full editor for customization, you lose the ability to see your project in the template anymore. In all, it’s not a flexible or wizard-driven enough process.
Basic Video Editing
Most trimming in Magix is done right on the timeline, with a razor icon for splitting the current track, which can be switched to Remove Start, Remove End, or Split Movie (to split all tracks at the same point). While you’re trimming a clip in the timeline, the preview window immediately shows the effect of the edit. This is playing catch-up with other software, such as PowerDirector and Premiere Elements, which already work that way.
The Find and Close Gaps option worked as advertised in my test movie. I also like the choice, Fill Blank Space With Still Image, which merely extends the last frame of the clip. You could, of course, simply drop a photo onto the empty timeline space, but this is more automatic and effective, since it’s basically a freeze-frame.
For more precise edits, the Edit trimmer lets you fine-tune a transition between clips, and the Object Trimmer window lets you do so for the start and end of a single clip. The dialog for both these activities is fairly complex, with three panels and no fewer than 25 control buttons. I can see how it would be effective, though getting accustomed to it might take some time.
Unlike most video editing software, Magix doesn’t include a Transition tab in the source panel. Instead you have to hunt in the Templates tab to find them (the Effects tab might make more sense, which some other apps use for transitions). Magix has happily joined the industry in calling transitions transitions instead of fades. You don’t get the vast choice of transitions you get in PowerDirector. For your 3D projects, 10 Stereo fades are on offer. As in most good video editing software these days, you can drag a clip’s corner to produce a cross dissolve transition—the most commonly used transition of all. The Edit Trimmer mentioned above offers detailed control over this type of transition.
Full-Power Video Editing
Double-clicking on a clip’s timeline entry opens the Effects panel, which offers text, lighting, color, chroma-key, distortion, speed, and lens correction (barrel and pincushion adjustment), and movement effects such as size/position and rotation. Some presets offer cool (or goofy, depending on your point of good) motion effects. Magix offers motion-tracking like that in Corel VideoStudio Pro X9, which lets you follow and onscreen object with an image, text, or effect. (More on that below.)
Magix’s new Stabilization tool has a very sparse interface, showing only an Analyze button to start. Once you’ve run that, the button changes to read Clear Motion Data. After running the tool on my test clip, rather than smoothing my camera jerking, the result was wiggly and worse looking than the original video. The old stabilization tool was superior, offering more adjustments of the effect. Users of the Premium edition can take advantage of the proDAD Mercalli plugin, which offers even more control and a more stable result.
Magix has Project Marker and Snap Markers to remind you of important locations in your movie, but those differ from standard keyframes, which the program also supports. Keyframes comprise a powerful video editing technique in Movie Edit Pro. This technique lets you smoothly progress an effect, title, crop, and so on, from one point in a movie to another. In Magix, you can use these with some effects—though not all. Also, the keyframe markers don’t appear in the main timeline; rather, they only appear at the bottom of the Effect panel. PowerDirector, by contrast, has recently made a push to make everything keyframe-able, and its implementation is clearer.
Motion Tracking
Magix Movie Edit Pro’s motion tracking lets an object follow something that moves around the screen in your video clip. You can use an overlay, such as text, or an effect, such as blur. Tracking is often used to obfuscate license plates or body parts. Magix uses the term Object Tracking for this.
Unlike Corel VideoStudio, which presents a clear motion-tracking button above the timeline, in Magix Movie Edit Pro you have to hunt for the tool. It’s hidden in the right-click context menu when you have an object selected in the timeline below a video clip. You choose Attach to Picture Position in the Video, but only after you’ve positioned the object or text.
After you find the tool, a long-winded dialog box tells you to “Select a picture section for which movements should follow the overlay object.” I did so, and the text box followed the football player I’d attached it to. But there’s no dialog box where you can refine the effect, and adding a tracked blur overlay is much harder than in competing apps. The whole process is way less intuitive than what you get in Corel VideoStudio, which even lets you do multipoint tracking. What’s more Magix doesn’t show you the actual track or let you edit it the way Corel does.
Advanced Movie Effects
Titles.Titles. Title templates included in Movie Edit Pro are categorized by their use; for example: intro/outro, caption, and subtitles. The upper two editions of Movie Edit Pro also include animated titles from NewBlue. There are now over 50 3-D title animations, and you can apply simple horizontal and vertical animation to any text you add. Some of them look pretty cool, but you can’t edit their 3-D aspects like depth or angle.
Video Effects. Video Effects. Movie Edit Pro’s Effects panel offers an Artistic filter, with controls for Erosion, Dilate, Emboss, Substitution (for colors), Quantize, Colorize, and Contour. You can get some zany looks with these. The Distortion tool offers Whirlpool, Fisheye, and Kaleidoscope effects, among others, all of which you can combine into one unrecognizable vision.
You can also add objects, such as arrows or a cigar. More downloadable effects and objects include a cartooner, a de-interlacer, noise reduction, and a liquid effect. The extra effects aren’t as well integrated into the program as CyberLink PowerDirector‘s plug-ins.
Movie Edit Pro Premium’s Film Looks retro and tone effects can give your picture added impact. Other choices include three Cinema looks, Cold, Warm, Fresh, Tilt Shift, and Vignette. You can easily add plug-in effects with a right click menu option. Chroma-keying is well implemented in the software.
Multicam.Multicam. This advanced technique takes some preparation to use in the Magix software, and the capability isn’t straightforward. Audio-based synchronization and an increase in the allowable camera angles to four are highlights of this version. Performance slowed down during my testing, making angle switching not as precise as I’d like, but at least you can make adjustments after the fact in the new timeline tracks the process creates.
Time Stretching. Time Stretching. Time stretching is easy in Magix, with its Stretching toolbar button, which can fit a clip to another track’s length, either by slowing it or speeding it up. You can also go to the Speed effect and plug in a value from .25 to 4x. Time stretching speeds up the audio without changing its pitch, while the Resampling option lets you turn your subject into one of the Chipmunks.
Picture-in-Picture.Picture-in-Picture. Under design elements effects are 25 picture in picture (or PiP) presets, such as 2/1 left, 4/3 top left—it would be nicer to see visual representations for these as PowerDirector gives you. As with that app, you can also simply adjust the size and position of each track for a custom PiP. I like how easy it is to rotate video, from the Rotation/Mirror effect.
Two video effect panels deal with color—Color, and Color correction. The first offers a white-point dropper, a color wheel, and an auto-color button, along with sliders for each of the primary colors and saturation. This lets you easily correct a shot, for example, to remove a greenish cast.
The color correction tools let you create a mask by clicking on, say, a sky, and then intensifying the blue of just that area. But you don’t get an equivalent to Premiere Elements’ three-way color correction, which lets you separately adjust color for low-, high-, and mid-tones. The Shot Match tool lets you do what its name says, taking a source color scheme and applying it to a target frame. In my testing, it did the opposite of that, however, taking the target’s color profile and applying it to the source. No matter which source and target I selected, it always adjusted the colors in one direction.
Travel MapsTravel Maps Several years ago, Apple wowed the vacation video-editing world with iMovie’s automated intros showing a plane crossing a map to indicate where you were traveling. It harked to old-time movies, but was effective, nevertheless. The Magix Travel Maps is a separate included application that does something similar, though it’s far less automatic.
Though it’s not very intuitive or automated, the feature (called Travel Route in the video editor and Travel Maps in its separate app) has been updated for high-DPI monitors like my 4K one in the latest release. You can buy extra-cost maps and animations; not a bad idea if you want good results. When you figure out how to create an animated route, saving it adds it to the end of your timeline—I’d prefer it be added to the end of the currently selected clip.
3D Editing.3D Editing. The third dimension has fallen out of favor lately when it comes to video, but Magix lets you easily import 3D footage and apply 3D titles and effects. You can adjust vertical and horizontal alignment. The program supports anaglyph and interlaced 3D.
Audio Editing
Movie Edit Pro can display the waveform for each clip in the timeline, and a full mixer pops up when you click its icon on the top-right corner of the timeline. A full-fledged sound editor, Magix Music Editor, can clean audio and apply noise reduction, equalizing, compression, and stereo FX. It’s pretty advanced, letting you choose a noise sample, optimize for voice, de-hiss, and remove camera noise. It also lets you convert older media, such as LPs, to digital.
A good selection of background music for soundtracks is available on the Audio tab of the source panel. One audio tool lets you add reverb and echo—I got a football game to sound like it was in a swimming hall. You can also raise or lower pitch, or change the tempo of music. The included synthesizer can add a variety of sounds—flowing water, wind, traffic, crowds, applause—fun stuff. A drum and bass synth turns you into your movie’s DJ. For slideshows, there are dozens of background tracks included.
With Magix’s beat-based editing, the program can decide when to switch clips based on the background music’s beat. You do this by opening the Snap Markers tool on the Effects tab and tapping it like a drum to show it the strong beats in the music. After this, when you drag clips or trim them near the snap marks, they’ll automatically snap to those points in the timeline. It’s not exactly automatic, but I can see how it could be useful, especially to action cam users.
Editing 360 Degree Video
Movie Edit Pro was among the first video editing software capable of editing 360-degree content, and the latest version improves on those capabilities. To test its VR prowess, I loaded some footage from a Samsung Gear 360 camcorder. I was also able to open a clip from the Ricoh Theta S in Magix.
When you start a project, the Movie Settings dropdown offers 360-degree options. With a clip selected in the timeline, you can choose the 360-degree Panorama section and muck around with the clip’s viewing angle on three axes. The software can stitch video to create 360 degrees, for example from shooting simultaneously with two or more GoPro cameras. You can also adjust the video’s perspective (you’re really just zooming) and fisheye/barrel distortion. You can output to pan-able video formats like those found on Facebook and Vimeo.
Magix includes stitching and stabilization for 360 VR content, which is pretty impressive. The stabilization worked as well as these tools usually do, smoothing some bumps out, but sometimes adding a wobbly look in their place. Movie Edit Pro also lets you move titles around in 360-degree space, though doing so isn’t as straightforward as in PowerDirector, which also offers motion tracking and transitions for 360 content.
Output and Sharing
Movie Edit Pro offers a lot of good output options, including direct uploading to Vimeo and YouTube from the up-arrow button at top right. As your movie uploads, a progress bar crawls across the bottom of the screen and shows time remaining. Format choices from here are limited, with only four quality levels and three file formats (WMV, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4). Choosing File Export Movie gets you a lot more detailed format options.
Full disc authoring with menus and chapters is provided, and you can output to most standard video file formats, including 4K and H.265. Simple device output options include High Resolution and Low Resolution for iOS and Android.
Performance
Magix supports graphics hardware acceleration for editing (with support for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs)—but not for rendering projects. Working with clips in the timeline is very snappy and I didn’t experience any unexpected program shutdowns—something that not all video editors can boast, not even products from big names like Apple and Pinnacle.
I tested rendering time by creating a movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to MPEG-4 full HD at 15Mbps, 30fps, using H.264 High Profile. Audio was MPEG AAC Audio: 192 Kbps. 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. The test movie (whose duration was just under 5 minutes) took Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium 7:38 (minutes:seconds) to complete. That result puts it way behind the other video software I tested: CyberLink PowerDirector took just a blistering 1:32, Pinnacle Studio took 1:45, and Adobe Premiere Elements took 4:01 for the same render project.
Magix: Making Movie Magic?
It’s likely that Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium has most of what you need for an enthusiast-level digital movie project with many powerful effects, multicam, 360-degree support, and audio editing tools. Though its interface has improved, it still lacks the smooth workflows found in competitors, especially for media organization and advanced effects like motion tracking. Our Editors’ Choice video editing application, CyberLink PowerDirector, makes getting the effects you want easier to find and use, and simply blows it away in rendering speed. If you’re on the macOS platform both iMovie (for entry level) and Final Cut Pro X (for serious amateurs and professionals) are Editors’ Choices, too. Adobe Premiere Pro works on both platforms, and it’s an Editors’ Choice for professionals.
