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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 September 2010
This suite of Movie editing is quite easy to use BUT many of the tools are difficult to understand. It probably needs a 15 year old to get the best it of it and I'm 73!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2006
I got this program (v.10) as a christmas present. I have been trying to find a reasonably priced editing tool for a while now, and I had hopes that this would fit the bill. But I ran into a few issues that make this unusable and maybe the experiences are worth sharing here:
a) Video captur from my Sony Digital works fine, unless I filmed in 16:9 (widescreen) Magix ignores this completly and you end up with an unusable image. Correction is available, but that does more harm then good.
b) Audio synchronisation is criminal. You can easily end up with Audio being completly out of line with the visuals
c) DVD creation can fail in curious ways (including program crash, unreadable DVDs and more)
d) High Definition is not supported either
Maybe version 11, which is out now is better, but I don't think I'll bother.
I've used Magix's editors for three years now and this version has ironed out a few of the outstanding bugs to make it a very stable and consistent product. It takes a while to learn but is very quick once you get the hang of it e.g. cursor keys to move frame by frame on the timeline, CTRL + up or down to zoom the timeline, key frame editor to fine tune video effects, etc. It now includes white balance correction and firewire preview which is great for seeing exactly what the output will look like (which is different to a PC monitor, or even a TV plugged into the TV out of the graphics card). Note that some of the context menus are a bit bewildering now due to the sheer number of features that the latest version offers, and take a bit of getting used to. I recently performed a test of stand alone MPEG encoders as I was convinced the supplied Ligos encoder would not be as good. I was pleasantly surprised to see it was very good after all and I probably won't be buying a separate program for this now. Overall, a very flexible product which will do most of the editing most people will need. I bought it for £30 from Amazon which has to be the bargain of the year.
I bought this because of problems I had with a bundled app, Nerovision Express. Now I wish I hadn't.
Unlike Nerovision, MEPP doesn't exploit the audio-sync corrections in MPEG files with dropped frames. This means you either have to mess around with sync by hand (horrible) or have another program process the audio (i.e. apply and remove the correction hints) beforehand.
I also had major problems with incorrect video interlacing (someone else I know had this problem; anyway, bottom field first seemed to work on my footage), and more recently the video being de-interlaced when I don't want it to be. Other problems included the software not being able to create necessary log files (eventually tracked down to the project name containing characters the program apparently didn't like).
The app sometimes creates disks that don't play back properly via PowerDVD/Windows Media Player, or that crash altogether in all cases.
There were also some strange artifacts and noise distortions during various simple transitions such as cross-fades and fade-to/from-black.
The video recorder didn't work well with my TV card (not that I needed that part of the app personally, which is just as well).
The frustrating thing is that many of the problems if they can be fixed at all are related to settings that are buried in menus that users of an amateur-oriented piece of software like this shouldn't have to worry about. The interface is neither hassle-free enough for low-end users, nor well-designed and accessible enough for higher-end amateurs.
If you want gimmicky "late-80s-Top-of-the-Pops" 3D transitions and lots of features over ease of use or reliability, this program is for you. Personally, I'd rather have they'd concentrated on getting the basic functionality working better.
It's a potentially powerful piece of software, but it's absolutely not worth the hair-pulling frustration and hassle.
