With a comprehensive feature set and a low price, Magix Movie Edit Pro 10 offers a powerful, entry-level video-editing program for your PC. While the program is harder to learn than its competition, the $49 title offers features to quickly edit video by dragging and dropping sequences and burning the final video onto a CD or DVD disc. And the program has a few features that go beyond those found in the competition.
For beginners, Movie Edit Pro lets you choose from 15 themes. After applying a theme, the program arranges the video segments, adds effects and soundtracks and builds a final movie. The results aren't bad, but the feature has limited practical use. I'm not criticizing Movie Edit Pro specifically-all of the consumer-oriented video programs offer this feature, but in the end, it's virtually useless.
Helpful tools assist you as you make a movie for the first time. Built-in Task Assistants, which are new to version 10, provide onscreen video that explains a selected task. For novices, there's a brief on-screen tutorial that glosses over the program's features.
Version 10 comes with a host of powerful new features. A welcome new Anti-Shake Filter removes blurs from handheld shots and a Comment Feature lets you add background commentary to a movie by speaking into a microphone. The program features new TV recording and new Digital TV support to edit and burn DVB streams to CD or DVD discs. A new timer lets you effectively use your PC as a personal digital video recorder. And recording and burning are fully-automated to conveniently save time when burning DVDs.
Movie Edit Pro's strength lies in its comprehensive feature set. Beyond basic video-editing, the program lets you make cuts, apply lots of special effects, animations, and 3D transitions, and create chapters on DVD discs. Version 10 comes with some 70 new video special effects templates and 25 combined special effects. The program supports chroma-keying, green-screen technology, which offers lots of visual possibilities.
Adding movie titles is easy with some 50 text generators that can create rolling credits and subtitles. The software's Video Trimmer lets you make precise scene cuts, edits and blends and recognizes scene changes to help you split a segment into individual scenes. Overview and Storyboard Edit Modes let you easily view, sort and arrange video. A plus, the program features a comprehensive 16-track Timeline Mode that offers lots of flexibility.
There are some 55 music templates that you may use to add introductory and background music. However, I wasn't all that impressed with the quality of the music and felt that the program gave you few options over the style of the music. Fortunately, if you want, you can import a .wav or mpg file to apply music of your own.
Controls are fairly intuitive. You can improve picture quality, add captions, apply fade effects, pan and zoom with the camera and apply rotational effects by dragging and adjusting slider bars. Some of these effects will be difficult for novices to understand and use, but they are generally higher order features.
To create slideshows and burn them onto a DVD or CD, the program offers convenient one-click image optimization to fix poor lighting conditions in photos and optimize brightness, contrast, color and more. I like the way that the program lets you adjust zooms and pans and scans in still photos to give slideshows a documentary quality-a feature that is often not found in consumer video-editing programs.
The Interactive DVD player offers some 55 templates to create intros, backgrounds (video/music) and animated buttons. There are 45 templates to clean-up, apply and adjust various audio effects that include reverb, relay, pitch and more. To support video work, the program comes with some 1,400 templates: 70 video, image & color effects, 170 blends and 260 video and enhancement motifs.
From a technical standpoint, the software now imports high-definition video and online movies from HDV, HDTV, DVB, WMVHD formats and saves in MPEG 1 and 2, MOV, WMV 9 as well as MPEG-4 and with DivX compression. MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 10 also supports recording, editing, converting and burning in the newer 16:9 widescreen format. To enhance audio introductions and background music, the program supports Surround Sound.
In general, Pinnacle Studio, the competition, is easier to understand and use. But overall, when you consider its comprehensive features and low price, Magix Movie Edit Pro 10 offers the best value. It's definitely one to consider for your video-editing projects.
5/23/05 www.daytrum.com Editorial Staff
video-editing - Magix Movie Edit Pro 10
