Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus REVIEW

[cybereality]

First off, I would like to thank MTBS3D for holding the great U-Decide contest which I was luckily enough to be one of the winners. The prize I won was a copy of Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus, which I will be reviewing today. I have only spent a few short hours with the program, so this is just my initial review. I will be updating this thread as I work with the program more.

I do have some experience editing video with Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. So going into this I was thinking this Magix program was going to be extremely bare-bones in comparison. But, in fact, it is actually a fully featured video editing suite that can hang with the big boys. In fact, I think it might even be better suited for amateur film-makers just looking to edit quick videos for YouTube. I found the interface very easy to use and pretty intuitive. It has all the basics you need for multi-track non-linear video editing. Importing videos was no hassle, and I was able to preview and scrub through 720P clips with no problem. Slicing scenes was simple (just hit the T key) and moving scenes around was a drag and drop affair. Pressing space toggled the play/pause of the scrubber and hitting the arrow keys would advance one frame at a time. Very easy. Adding fades was as easy as right-clicking near the end of a scene and choosing "fade-out" and then a handle appeared to adjust the fade length. This could also be done for audio. If you have worked with other editing programs this will be easy to pick up. There are also a bunch of effects you can add just by clicking in the menu (adjusting brightness/contrast, color correction, chroma key, etc.) and you see the results in real-time. You can also add text effects easily, for titles and things like that. They had some cheesy stuff like 3D text but I guess that could be cool for comedic effect. They also have a whole bunch of stuff I haven't tested yet, like integrated image editing and audio editing (you can even synthesize your own music) so this is a pretty full featured suite. Take a look at the interface:

MAGIX_3D_01.jpg

Now, of course what you want to know is how it handles 3D. Well I can say it works great. In fact, I cannot imagine it being any easier than they have made it. Basically all you have to do is import the 3D source video into the workspace (just like with normal 2D video). Then you click on the 3D effect and choose your source type. They allow full-resolution dual left/right stereo pairs, or side-by-side (either parallel or cross-eye at half-res or full-res). They also claim to support 3D video files from the Fujifim W1/W3 and Aiptek i2. This is probably all you would ever need. I can't imagine anyone storing their original footage in interlaced or anaglyph or anything like that. So this will probably cover most people. However if you have some weird format you may have to use Stereo Movie Maker first to get some standard files. After you add this filter you now have 3D. You can adjust the alignment of the 3D with both horizontal and vertical directions, as well as rotational. It also does some smart-stretching of the clips, so you don't end up with black bars or a smaller video size like you do with Stereo Movie Maker. This process is very easy to do with sliders, and you can see the result on screen as you do it. I found this to be more precise than with Stereo Movie Maker. There is also an option to offset one eye by a number of frames (to sync the videos) however I choose to do this by hand on the timeline before making the videos 3D. You can also add text over 3D video and it works like you expect. They have 3D text effects that work in stereo 3d, which is a nice touch. However, simple 2D text overlays are properly handled in stereo 3D, they are simply shown at screen-depth. This is a huge plus for the program, as dealing with text can be really annoying to have to do if you are working with editing programs with no 3D support. Very well done.

From the preview window you can choose your 3D viewing method and now preview in 3D. This works best for anaglyph or interlaced. The best possible setup is if you have a Zalman monitor (like I do) as you can preview in real-time in 3D while you work. If you have a CRT monitor with interlaced shutter-glasses this should also be fine. It does support Nvidia 3D Vision, however it only works in full-screen mode. Furthermore it doesn't seem like you can control the playback while in full-screen, once it opens you have to watch the whole video through. Also, I was not able to escape from this mode unless I control-alt-deleted the program. ESC, Alt-tab, Alt-F4 did not work. This may be because I am using the Zalman drivers with Nvidia (maybe they only tested with Nvidia 3D Vision glasses). Still seems a bit buggy. However since I am on the Zalman, I can safely not click that button, interlaced and anaglyph seem to work fine. I do wish they had more 3D viewing options, like vertical interlaced (for my DIY parallax barrier), checkerboard (for DLP), other anaglyph options (dubois, colorcode, etc.), cross-eye, parallel and mirror. All of those should be relatively simple to implement seeing what they already have working, but I am not sure how much demand there is. Most people will probably end up using anaglyph mode as that is the most supported. Even if you own Nvidia 3D Vision, you will probably want to use anaglyph to edit as you can preview in real-time and not have the hassle to going back and forth between full-screen mode (provided you can get out of it).

In terms of exporting, it is also a very simple process. When you are exporting (from the main export control panel) there is just a drop-down box for stereo 3d. In it you can choose "2D" (the default), "side-by-side", "side-by-side cross-eye" or "anaglyph". It might have been nice if they also allowed for output to other formats like interlaced, checkerboard, over-under or other anaglyph modes, but in almost all cases you will want to use side-by-side anyway. That is the best format for YouTube3D and will be what will work on 3D HDTVs if you have one. You are able to choose whatever video format and codec you wish, I was working at 1280 x 720 using the x264 codec in an AVI container. I was able to export a 3:30 minute 3D video in a little under 15 minutes. This is simply amazing to me. Previously I was syncing and editing down my 720P source footage in VirtualDub first, then processing it with Stereo Movie Maker. To export a 3-5 minute 720P clip from VirtualDub in 'Full Processing Mode' (necessary to maintain the sync) was taking me about 45 minutes per clip. I could run them simultaneously, but it would still take over an hour. Then to process those 2 clips into a single 720P side-by-side video (half-res) in Stereo Movie Maker could easily take another hour. And this is with my computer fully dedicated to the video processing. I was not really able to use the PC while this was happening. With Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus, this whole process took about 15 minutes which is less than 13% of the time it took before. And I could still use my computer to do other things. This doesn't even take into account the new features available, like adding titles and fades that can't be done with VirtualDub or Stereo Movie Maker. So this is going to be a huge boon to my 3D film-making, which I basically given up recently due to the excessive hassle of editing the video. I am much more likely to go out and film, when I know I can have the video edited and uploaded on YouTube in under an hour. And the quality looks just as good as before, check out this test video I have put on YouTube3D (click the video title to go to YouTube for the 3D options and choose 720P for best quality):

[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njuAzaPmG0c[/youtube-hd]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njuAzaPmG0c" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As you can see the quality is as good or better than my earlier videos done with VirtualDub/StereoMovieMaker. This is probably because I was encoding twice, so clearly some quality was getting lost in translation. With Movie Edit Pro I am working directly with the source footage so I am getting full quality. Overall I am very happy with this program and I have only used it for a few hours. I am sure there is a lot I have not discovered yet. The program sells for what looks like $99, but they are having a sale until December 6th where you can get it for $79, not a bad price. For about the cost of 2 PC games you could have a professional quality editing suite. For the time it will be saving me on editing my 3D videos it would surely have been worth the price (had I not won a copy in the contest). However, the program is not perfect. I did have it crash on me a few times tonight for no good reason. I will be honest though, I had other programs crash too tonight (like Steam) so maybe it is just my computer. But maybe there are some bugs left to iron out with this program. Even so, it still seems like a nice application. I will be updating this thread with further videos and review material. If you have any questions or comments, please add to the thread.

// cybereality

[cybereality]

I have put together another 3D video using the Magix software. This time I converted a 2D video into 3D using the time-shift method. I actually recorded a 15 minute video tutorial on how I did this (uploading to YouTube right now). I think it shows how easy the Movie Edit Pro software is to use. I think, altogether, it took about 15 minutes to put this video together, and that includes the time it took to export! Unfortunately, the source video was low-res, so 480P is the highest it goes (almost all of my other YT3D videos are 720P). It still looks alright though. Make sure to click the title to go to YouTube and watch at full 480P quality in 3D.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3QIK7Jl4ts[/youtube]

[cybereality]

I have put together a 15 minute tutorial video on how I did the above 3D conversion using Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus and the time-shift method. I think it illustrates the ease of which you can edit 3D videos with the program. Although the tutorial is about 15 minutes, most of that is my explaining the process. You could probably do the same thing in like 5 minutes after you know what to do. Also, the tutorial itself was edited using Movie Edit Pro, so it shows the kinds of effects you can easily do: zooming into video areas, overlaying images, simple animation, etc. I am finding this program to be very nice to work with, and luckily did not crash once while I was recording. The video is 720P, so go to YouTube if you want to see in HD quality.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSlQs3IdWJA[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSlQs3IdWJA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Likay]

Cool! And indeed: Magix movie edit pro seems to be a very nice piece to work with!