Quoted from itreviews.co.uk
Despite its title you only have to take a look at the price tag to twig that Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 Plus isn't really going to cut it playing among the big boys such as Adobe Premiere or even Apple's Final Cut Pro.
In fairness though, in a short space of time it's plain to see it performs well against the likes of Adobe Premiere Elements and has enough features and editing tools to allow a demanding user to create, export and share a professional looking video.
Now in its fifteenth version, Magix has had quite a long time to tweak and perfect Movie Edit Pro's interface. Reworked to provide more intuitive control, the set-up of the main suite makes perfect sense if you have previously dabbled in any other home editing software. Once in Edit Mode you can work with a standard timeline and preview monitor along with quick access to all your media files, as well as an editing media pool including fades, titles and effects.
Featuring a total number of 99 different tracks there's plenty of scope for layering up your creations without restriction. It's easy enough to browse through your rushes and sound clips using the ‘Import' tab, although we recommend you make use of a dedicated Magix project folder rather than try to browse through clips saved in separate locations on your hard drive, as previewing is a little slow. Alternatively, you can record footage into your PC through an external piece of hardware or a copyright-free CD or DVD.
Really, the best bit about Movie Edit Pro 15 is you can take it up to a level you're comfortable with when you're ready. If you just want to put together a short home movie, the fluidity in which you can piece together a fairly complex timeline is a bonus.
Similarly, if you want to spend a bit more time perfecting a video that involves greater technical ability, then there's enough scope to deal with a few more challenging tasks too. Additions such as MultiCam editing and Chroma key also mean you can push the software a little more once you've found your feet.
New features introduced to Movie Edit Pro Plus since previous versions include colour correction tools as well as AVCHD editing for creating and burning Blu-ray discs with animated menus. There's no denying that the scope of the software offers good value for money, but in piling these extras in it takes a bit more dedication to work out how to use them effectively.
For those wanting to create holiday movies or put together a promotional video, extra software is here in abundance. This includes travel route and 3D realtime animation software, Magix Photo Manager 2008, Magix Xtreme Photo Designer 6 and Xtreme Print Studio as well as Mufin MusicFinder Base.
This is great if you don't already have software to help you out with these tasks, but if you'd rather not fill your machine's hard drive it can take a lot of effort to stop the installation from filling up disc space with extras you may not be particularly interested in. Some of the additions felt a little forced on us and we felt the appeal of the software would be even greater if it was streamlined a little.
Having said that, as a bonus, Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 Plus also currently comes bundled with Photo & Videoshow Soundpool 6, a collection of soundtracks, songs and natural effects that are perfect for adding a more professional dimension to video. Normally these bundled sound effects discs tend to be a little cringe-inducing, but we were pleased to note a really impressive variety of high quality tracks that sounded great when thoughtfully edited into our movie.
Short introduction and explanatory videos are included with the software, but armed with a reasonably helpful manual guide and after taking a bit of time finding our feet with the interface set-up, we were able to form a good quality two-minute video complete with scene cuts and soundtrack in less than half an hour.
The Export options proved useful when saving out our creation as a Windows Media Player file (MPEG, QuickTime and RealPlayer are also good export options), but we had a bit of trouble using the dedicated YouTube upload feature as the software wouldn't recognise our log-in details even though we checked with YouTube we had all the correct information. This meant we had to export separately and then upload to YouTube, which was a disappointingly long-winded way of going about things.