Am I Alone In Using Magix Movie Edit Pro?

[Roger Gunkel]

Having been on this forum for a while now and particularly the 'non repeatable events' section, I seem to be the only person here using Magix Media Pro for my editing. Having spent 30 years editing video on numerous formats and NLEs since they first appeared, I seem to be peculiar in my choice! I have seen a few passing mentions in other threads on the forum about it being a consumer only programme for editing holiday videos, but have found that to be far from the truth.

I first found it by chance about 4 years ago after much searching, while trying to edit 3d footage from a twin cam rig. It seemed to be the only affordable programme that had serious 3d editing facilities so I went ahead and bought it after a free trial. That was MEP17 plus, and I have since upgraded through MXplus and then to MEP13, with possibly a further upgrade to MEP14 if I feel it has enough extras.

The main trouble with the programme is the lack of a decent manual and the very quirky way of finding some of the facilities, but being used to various NLEs I stuck with it for the excellent 3d facilities. After spending an hour at the London BVE show Adobe stand talking about 3d editing in 2012, I found that I could do on Magix what Adobe were struggling to offer their pro customers for thousands of pounds investment. as I became more familiar with it's quirky ways, I then also started to use the programme for 2d work and multi camera editing, using the excellent audio synching facility, whilst others here seem to need Plural Eyes etc to get their own NLE programmes to do the same.

I seem to have no problem mixing and matching various codecs and I can input my 50p, 50i, AVCHD, mp4 etc recordings, in addition to various 3d cameras that I have and the programme seems quite happy about it.

Am I missing a few things here that others are able to do with their NLEs, or are my requirements way down on what others need? Or is it that the programme has been dismissed or overlooked in favour of the more fashionable alternatives? I will say that I have tried the trial versions of the Magix ProX programmes at various times and have seen nothing there to tempt me that I can't do on their vastly cheaper offerings.

Roger

[Chris Harding]

Hey Roger

I remember using it once and I really liked all the extra clips that came with it!

What I did many years ago was run trials of all the software out there and see how I fared by just jumping in at the deep end..no tutorials no help just throw a clip into the NLE and go. I struggled with most editors except Sony Vegas the old Version 4 edition...it seemed easy so I kept using it!!

My first NLE was made by Corel ... Luminere V1 ..it actually worked quite well.

Since my trial days, I have tried Edius as it came free with my Panasonic cameras but I didn't like the workflow and I also tried Corel's new software and didn't like that either!

I'm not a dedicated user so if I found something better I would use it!! So far Vegas 10e is what I use and I just find it so easy to use that something even easier needs to come along to make me change.

Maybe buying a car is much the same thing ?? We all have different ones but they all get us from A to B!

Chris

[James Manford]

I don't think there is any right or wrong to which NLE you use to get the job done. Has a bride ever asked you to ONLY use Adobe Premiere to do the job? no.

I played around with loads of consumer and professional NLE's and settled with Sony Vegas in the end. Why? I picked up on it's features very quickly.

I'm a confident, just above intermediate Adobe Photoshop user so you would think I would naturally learn Premiere and After Effects. But for me both were a nightmare ... Sony Vegas had widely available tutorials on Youtube. And it handled what ever I threw at it.

I've recently learned the new version of Adobe Photoshop allows you to edit videos in a timeline ... now THAT IS very interesting ! as you can edit videos just like the way you edit photographs within the program.

[Peter Riding]

If this is what we are talking about then its lack of multi-cam editing would kill it for me:

MAGIX Movie Edit Pro ? Video editing software

It claims to have multi-cam but then says its for two cameras. Not sure how that qualifies as multicam - it would appear to be no real advantage over simply editing the two tracks as you go. I need 4/5 multicam as its fundamental to the look of the product I offer; I much prefer frequent cuts between multiple viewpoints rather than the physical movement of a single main cam accompanied by a locked down B (which I also regard as more client and guest friendly on the actual day).

I have a bunch of programs that in theory can do the editing up to a point such as Nero and Cyberlink but I bought them for other reasons. I settled on Vegas because of its relatively intuitive and thorough workflow and feature set. Having spent years getting up to advanced skills in Photoshop I didn't want to go through that sort of thing again with Premier. But Vegas has relatively few resources for learning advanced in depth stuff and that is a negative for me.

Vegas is still a one-off purchase. I hate the Adobe rental plan :- (

The availability of plugins may also be an issue as these are not usually supported except within the biggie NLE's. I'm not a big user of plugins but I wouldn't want to have to change NLe's in the future just because one becomes essential. I'm thinking noise reduction, stabilisation, titling, audio fixing, skin smoothing, etc.

Pete

[Roger Gunkel]

Hi Peter, the problem with Magix is poor promotion, poor support and poor documentation, plus the trial version has a lot of important stuff disabled, which puts potential users off. The programme itself is excellent. The multi camera editing is certainly shown as 2 camera, but that is not quite right as you can use as many streams on the timeline as you want, but can only see any two at one time in separate windows. You can of course change which tracks appear in the windows. I simply use one base track that is usually my main camera, expand the time line to full screen so that I can see all the remaining tracks easily, them swap between them as required, or do a rolling mix. The documentation says nothing about that at all. In addition, all tracks can be highlighted at once, and one used to synch all the others instantly, I assume similar to Plural Eyes. I am filming a musical theatre production this afternoon with 5 cameras and will be editing it in Magix MEP plus 2013

Plugins are useable, but the programme already has noise reduction, stabilisation, titling, white balance correction, full colour controls, audio editing tools including compression, limiting, reverb, time stretching etc. there is also cropping, zooms, picture levelling etc. etc. All of these can also be used in 3d if that is your thing, which it is for me.

Personally I think it's a little jewel, but it takes a bit of learning and when you get used to a particular programme, it is often not worth the effort of learning something new if you are happy with what you can already do.

Roger

[Adrian Tan]

I've only used Premiere and FCP, but one advantage that Premiere used to have (besides integration with the rest of the suite, which is sometimes handy for me but most times not), was in editing DSLR footage natively, no transcoding needed.

Apart from that... Well, I do use Photoshop and After Effects and Dreamweaver and Audition and Encore and Business Catalyst... and a PC, so PPro seems a natural choice. But the truth is I could probably be happy with pretty much any NLE. The basic functionality is the same with anything, isn't it?

[John Nantz]

Hi Rodger,

Originally Posted by Roger Gunkel

Having been on this forum for a while now and particularly the 'non repeatable events' section, I seem to be the only person here using Magix Media Pro for my editing.

While you might be nearly the only person here using Magix, you aren't alone. At the last meeting of the Amateurfilmgruppe Volksheim-Ottakring one of the members gave a demonstration on using it.

Their web site: AFGV - Ottakring

From what I understand it is very cheap or perhaps free. I'm using FCPX so I've got enough to do learning all the ins and outs of that application. Learning for me seems to be two steps forward, one step back process.If one doesn't keep using something, or a part of it, it's easy to start forgetting it.

[Roger Gunkel]

As you say Adrian, if you can use one you can use them all with a bit of adaption. I have used most of the most popular, but I am just surprised that everybody seems to use basically the same 3 or 4 NLEs. It seems perhaps I am alone in using Magix I wonder why?

Roger

[Roger Gunkel]

Originally Posted by John Nantz

Hi Rodger,



While you might be nearly the only person here using Magix, you aren't alone. At the last meeting of the Amateurfilmgruppe Volksheim-Ottakring one of the members gave a demonstration on using it.

Their web site: AFGV - Ottakring

From what I understand it is very cheap or perhaps free. I'm using FCPX so I've got enough to do learning all the ins and outs of that application. Learning for me seems to be two steps forward, one step back process.If one doesn't keep using something, or a part of it, it's easy to start forgetting it.

Hi John,

I think that as Magix is a German programme, it is probably more popular in Germany and comparatively unknown elsewhere, which is a shame as it is a very capable programme. Thanks for the link I'll put the site through the translator as my German is not great :-(

Roger

[James Manford]

Roger, if it helps. I use Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. It's not a movie maker ... but I've been using that program for years to tune/clean up audio. Most notably to transfer my Vinyl collection to mp3s.

[Roger Gunkel]

Hi James, I haven't used that particular programme but MEP comes bundled with a very good audio cleaning and editing programme which I frequently use, so probably very similar.

Roger

[John Nantz]

Roger - I was just snooping around on Magix's web site and found out that they have a plethora of programs. The video application that I understood to be "free" or at least very inexpensive, isn't free at all (although there is a free trial version), and compared to FCPX their "pro" version is less expensive at $199 vs $299 for FCPX. But ….

(link to Video Pro): Video Pro X5, $200: MAGIX Video Pro X ? Professional video editing

As Jim pointed out, they have an Audio Cleaning application: Audio Cleaning Lab: MAGIX Audio Cleaning Lab ? Audio Editing
I also have a collection of vinyl that I'd like to digitize so this would be an option to look into.

Magix has an on-line Magazine: Magazine: The MAGIX Magazine | News, Tutorials, & Tips from MAGIX
about their products. While I don't do any serious photo editing there was an article about erasing the background using one of their applications and this was very interesting.

And one more thing, it appears their applications are more windoze oriented as they frequently talk about 8.

[Roger Gunkel]

That's a great price John and not available in the UK at that price. I've had a good look at ProX5 and most of it seems to be identical to Mep13/14, although the Multicamera editing looks to have preview windows for up to nine tracks which would be handy. If they make a good price offer in the UK, I might go for it just for the multitrack upgrade alone.

Roger

[Rainer Listing]

Not exactly alone. Long time early user, switched top Vegas Pro at version 9, still have MMEP2013+ and sometimes use it - it has some interesting features not available in the others, like object tracking. But, the consumer version only has a single source/preview window, which slows you down and makes it hard to match eyelines. The pro version (video pro) does have two windows but is unstable on my system.