Review by John D Hillmer

I installed the Magix video editing program on a large DELL desktop machine, a Studio/XPS 9000 i7 quad core with 24gigs of RAM, and a ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series graphics card with 1 gig of dedicated video memory (my C: program and cache disk is an 1TB SSD).

The installation program asked if I wanted to ALSO install Simpliclean (a register booster and register cleaning tool) I said NO. I have other tools already that I know and trust; Simpliclean is one I have not used before, and it felt like bloatware.

During installation messages talked about some of the features that I might want to be aware of, including –n Stabilizationn Object Tracking (of objects on in the scenes)n Mobile Video Editing for (or on?) Androidn A sound archive for slideshows and videos Sound editingn Showfy for sharing (hmm, Id rather use YouTube or Facebook directly)n The latest offers, always up to date (hmm, it better not try and sell me something every time I turn around, like Pinnacle products do!)n It made me close MS Outlook for the installation to work (it actually stopped during the installation and complained that Outlook was running, and asked me to close it thats a first! - Im not sure what it would be messing with that Outlook would also be using)nnThe online registration was easy using the supplied very long key code, I did have to give it my name, email etc., to create an account with them, but thats no big deal to me.

I then ran the program, and found their _Demo project and clicked on it, (just a hunch that was the right file) and wow, it loaded up the timeline with the tracks and fades and transitions, picture in picture, show-speed, fast-speed, etc., all very nice. I played the demo project on and watched the timeline, to see how this thing works.

* NOTE, I usually use Cyberlinks video editing products for most of my projects, but I also have Pinnacles products, and Adobe CS6 and Sony products too, along with ProShow Producer, so Im familiar with how video editing companies think, and thus how they build their editing tools, so with a little trial and error, I was able to navigate around Magix without any trouble.

I will say that on my PC, the live playback within the editing tool window was very good, better than Cyberlinks (once Cyberlink creates the shadow files, then things get better for real time editing and real time play back on the screen while you are editing, but its still not as good as I was seeing here with the Magix product!) That was cool!nnI do feel that the world probably has enough video editing tools, so seeing this one made me think, oh well, another mouse trap, and this one is probably better in some respects than the more popular Adobe and more established products such as those from Cyberlink or Pinnacle or Sony, but competition is good, and this will force the others to get better too. Yes, there are YouTube videos for help (no printed manual comes with this product, but then no one reads those anyways). However, theres a lot more on YouTube by professional and amateur people on how to do things in the other more established and de facto products, so while this one is good, it might not matter the others have more info on them already.

If youve never used one of these programs before, this one is very powerful, has all the nice options, but the learning curve will be steep to master all the options. I will keep this one, and add it to my collection. I liked the easy way that it handled speeding up or slowing down video within a track (and, I will look harder now at the other products that I have to see if they can do that as easily too). Sometimes Ive done this the long and hard way, by making a clip, slowing it down, and then including that slowed down clip within a project. Thats a lot of steps, whereas Magix made this look as easy as adding a fade or transition! Cool!