Magix Movie Edit Pro 2016 Premium review - great video stabilisation

It can’t be easy being the software product manager that’s charged with the task of producing a new version every year. Video-editing software needs to keep up with the latest video standards, but in most other respects the needs of the average user don’t change much from year to year. Support for the latest standards don’t make for an enticing upgrade, though, and people expect must-have new features with each iteration.

Magix is off to a good start by bundling proDAD Mercalli v4 with this latest version of Movie Edit Pro Premium. This is the creme de la creme of video stabilisation, and normally retails at £179. It offers detailed control over processing, with the ability to correct on various axes of motion and apply lens distortion correction from a library of presets for popular action-cams from GoPro, DJI and many others.

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This version of Mercalli v4 only works as a plug-in inside Movie Edit Pro, and it’s a little frustrating that the pop-up editor must be closed in order to preview the results. Still, it’s a small sacrifice in order to access such high quality video stabilisation at this price. A bigger concern is that when right-clicking a video file and selecting Image Stabilisation, it offers the choice of Magix’s own stabilisation algorithm or Mercalli v2, which is also lurking in the list of video effects. Mercalli v4 is available via the Effects tab, but there’s a high chance that users will never find it.

^ It’s great to have the powerful Mercalli v4 video stabilisation included with a consumer video editor 

The Title tab includes some new templates that are unusually tasteful and sophisticated for consumer editing software. Some are simple animations, such as subtle zooms and fades, while others incorporate animated graphic elements. The latter appear on the timeline as three grouped objects - one for the text, another for the graphics and a third as a mask for the graphics so the video appears behind the titles object. It’s a little messy but it allows the various elements to be ungrouped and edited individually if necessary. The animations for the text elements are applied using the software’s standard Fade and Size/Position tools, so they can be edited to your heart’s content.

I don’t often get excited about transitions, as anything other than dissolves and fade to black tends to look gimmicky. However, the new blur-based transitions are actually pretty good, using animated linear and radial blurs to segue from one clip to another. There’s clearly some GPU acceleration going on, as these complex blur effects played back smoothly.

^ The blur-based transitions and animated titles templates are unusually stylish

It wasn’t entirely plain sailing, though. These transitions have a fixed duration, and applying them to an existing transition changed the length of the transition. Depending on the selected ripple editing setting, this caused objects on other tracks to become out of sync. It sometimes made titles objects on other tracks mysteriously jump to a different track, and in some cases they disappeared entirely.

The new 360 degree Panorama function is designed for spherical photos from cameras such as the Ricoh Theta. It provides simple controls to pan around the image and dynamically warps perspective to give a fish-eye effect. It’s a niche feature but will be welcomed by some. I was also able to use it to pan around stitched panoramas, but the controls become extremely slow to respond when presenting it with huge JPEGs with hundreds of megapixels.

It was impossible to export at 4K resolution in Movie Edit Pro 2015, and sadly that’s still the case here. There are export templates for standard definition, 720p and 1080p, but despite the ability to edit in 4K, there’s no equivalent export template. It’s possible to work around this by selecting 4K export to YouTube and retrieving the file that’s created, but it’s hardly an elegant solution.

It’s also still impossible to export 2.7K projects in MPEG-4 format at any resolution. The GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition can shoot at 2.7K, which gives some useful extra pixels to maintain high quality after stabilisation processing crops the image. Movie Edit Pro helpfully sets the timeline resolution to match the first imported clip, but for 2.7K projects it offers an empty drop-down list of export resolutions in MPEG-4 format.

There are lots of positives attributes to Movie Edit Pro, but during testing, our attention was more often drawn towards its rough edges and annoying traits. As before, the interface is dominated by long lists of options in menus that make it hard to locate features. For example, the website claims to offer improved object tracking so titles and effects stay glued to subjects in the video footage, but there’s no mention of tracking anywhere in the online manual. I’d almost given up looking when I chanced upon an option in the right-click menu called “Attach to picture position in the video”. The process turned out to be simple and effective but you’d never guess from reading the paragraphs of awkwardly worded text instructions. I doubt that most users would ever find it. 

There’s masses of additional content available, spanning 20 downloads and totalling over 6GB, but there’s a lot of filler. I’d much rather have a leaner application with only the best, most useful functions. Speaking of which Check out our best video editing picks for alternatives.