Video Editing Bangs per Buck

grahamlthompson

The same to you and your family.    Just waiting the hour before retiring

Graham

chrishull3

Hope you had a good time i have been looking at my [avchd bds] with avchd set at best quality its 1700 Kbits/sec on the software so i guess 2-3 down on that is not a lot,with BD its 2500 Kbits/sec and that is usualy 1-2  down after render,so what i am saying although the settings show as 5 Kbits/sec difference between the two my discs play around 7 different so its not far out.

grahamlthompson

This brings together the following built in features

Single Frame Export
3D animation on a path
Route animator
Soundtrack generator

Magix Route Animation on Vimeo

senu

Graham  its  great to know these features are on tap if one need them ,  and I do recommend Magix on your " recomendation but
1) How easy is it to use ..Previous versions were wizard heavy and also not kind to  hardware
2) What do you wish it could have that it does not? I was reading aboy it needing you to buy plugs in as extra  ect ?
FWIW I have Vegas Pro ..

grahamlthompson

Certainly kind to hardware, I only have a lowly core i3 laptop though it has lots of expansion potential.  It's a 17" Widescreen Medion from Aldi it cost £370.00 but does have an express card slot, an extra drive bay (now with a 500GB drive in it), esata and hdmi out.

Coming from Premiere it's a bit of a learning curve, there's not much missing but it's sometimes not how you expect it to work. It's not going to match Vegas Pro but at the price it offers much of the capabilities of a much more expensive editor.  EG The more expensive versions have multicamera editing. Very handy for wedding videographers.

What's missing.  The customisation features you get by combining Photoshop and Encore to produce menus for DVD-Video, Blu-ray and AVCHD.

You can't easily use nested timelines as you can in Premiere, very handy for complex projects. The animation capabilities in terms of Premiere's bezier curve editing for motion and velocity are much more limited but you can smooth entry and exit from keyframes. Look at the motion of the stills as they de-accelerate into their positions on the map. Compared to After Effects it's a toy but how many non pros really get to grip with the massive number of object properties you can handle in AE.


I have the premium version which you don't need any extras at all. Unlike the earlier versions afaik the basic versions support ac3 5.1 editing. A key requirement for me as I have a camcorder that records 5.1 audio.

There's some really handy other capabilities.

Image stabilisation

You can get an object to follow an on screen moving object for example like a speech bubble without laborious key frame generation.

3D editing (not an option I use)

Screen capture of video, for instance you can record it's own window to produce nice video tutorials of how to use the software.

A nice 5.1 mixer which works with all output options.

Auto panorama stitching for multiple stills.

Reasonable chroma key options.

First class free support by e-mail.  In my limited experience better than Sony's (I never did find out why updating my version of Sony Movie Studio 11 Platinum removed the help file capability).

It's by no means perfect.  For instance look at the last still image of Seville which rotates onto the screen and then expands to fill the frame.

This should have been possible with just one image.  I had to use the same image twice on the timeline with the first keyframe copied from the last of the same image previously.

I have tried quite a few NLE's so far at the price it's the best value I have found. (Until someone else finds better).

senu

Thanks a lot for that Magix should pay you !
I might get it just for usability  experience if it doesn't cost too much

grahamlthompson

Forgot one missing capability.

No 3 point editing capability.  You have to get the professional Magix software to get that which also adds (limited compared to Encore) Photoshop editing of optical disc menus.

Why not have a play with a trial version for free. ?

Bob++

I am not experienced enough to know what might be missing from Magix Pro. - there is still loads I didn't get to grips with yet.

I did get Magix 3d maker though, because I wanted to make a rotating title.

The help in early editions was pants (I upgraded from magix15) and has now been vastly improved. The dedicated forum is still pants though. Youtube is a great resource for help too.

jonhilt

Although there's a lot of work still to be done, I would recommend people to take a look at the lightworks beta project.

Lightworks

They're busy working on the next beta release but so far I've had quite a lot of success with the current version. Coming from a novice background I've had no issues learning the user interface.

After all, you can't get a better price than free (worth reading the important announcement at the top of the page as they are going to be offering a paid version soon).

rogs

I had a look at Lightworks when they first introduced it as a freebie, but it crashed so often, it was virtually unusable!
Glad to hear it's improved. Should be OK if you don't have to 'unlearn' one of the more standard format NLEs  - Lightworks certainly have different way of doing things!!

But as you say, you can't argue with the price!

Whatever happened to the other freebie -Videolan Movie Creator?

The initial release of that was so bad, they even said on the website itself it would probably eat your dog! --- that was ages ago. Never heard of any updates?......