Magix Movie Edit Pro 10 Video Editing Software Review

Magix Gets Serious

The low-cost video editing software market has really been heating up in the past year or so, resulting in a plethora of low-cost, full-featured video software packages. Case in point: Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, a rich, well-rounded solution that costs about as much as a newly minted video game. Magix clearly intends to corner the worldwide low-cost video editing market with Movie Edit Pro 10, and our first look indicates they might just have a winner on their hands. Pro 10 includes storyboard and timeline editing, CD/DVD creation, slideshow software, a well-organized interface and excellent built-in tutorial options. This product will do almost everything a hobbyist video editor would ever want to do, while leaving plenty of room for the Adobes, Avids and Apples of the world to take up the slack when it's time to grow into the professional realm.

Start It Up

To test Movie Edit Pro 10, we installed the software on our test Pentium 4 computer with a 2.8 GHz processor, 1GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 video display card. Movie Edit Pro 10 comes with 2 CDs: a Program CD-ROM and a Content CD with an archive of video and audio material you can use in your productions. Installation was a bit time-consuming, and resulted in one easily recovered crash. Total time required setting up the software, crash and recovery included, was about 40 minutes.

After installation, two new program shortcuts appear on your desktop: one for Movie Edit Pro 10, and another for Magix's Media Manager 2004 Silver software. The latter is a limited edition version of Media Manager Platinum, a sort of cross between a full-featured file player, photo album software, disc burner and uber-iTunes knockoff, complete with a music editor and a gigantic list of Internet radio stations.