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Magix has been a leader in audiovisual media software for more than two decades, notably for its industry-standard Sequoia audio editing software. The company's Movie Studio enthusiast-level video editing software trails Adobe, Corel, and CyberLink in both ease of use and stability, though its rendering performance is much improved. Our Editors' Choice winners in the enthusiast video, Corel VideoStudio and CyberLink PowerDirector, have more features, are easier to use, and are more reliable.
For the 2023 edition, Magix adds search and favoriting for effects and templates, Intel graphics hardware acceleration, and minor interface improvements. Previous updates added vertical video formats, social media templates, high-DPI monitor support, 8K editing, NewBlue effects, and an updated Start dialog. These features join a full stable of existing ones including 360-degree VR footage editing, stabilization, motion tracking, action-cam templates, beat-based editing, and an in-app plug-in store.
How Much Does Magix Movie Studio Cost?
Magix's consumer video editing software is available at three levels: the standard Movie Studio [$69.99 list], Movie Studio Platinum [$99.99], and Movie Studio Suite [$129, the version reviewed here]. Those are official list prices, though they're often heavily discounted. The three are also available as subscriptions for $2.99, $3.99, and $4.99 per month with a 12-month commitment. If you don't want a year-long commitment, you can get Movie Studio for $7.99 per month and Platinum for $9.99 per month.
The standard edition is surprisingly capable, with 64-bit operation, support for 4K content, and lots of effects. But it lacks real-time preview, multicam, stereo 3D recording, Movie Looks effects, screen capture, secondary color correction, beat-based editing, video proxy, 360-degree support, and several premium effects, including the new travel templates.
The Platinum edition increases the track limit to 200 from Standard's 32 and adds multicam and 360-degree editing, more effects, and more audio tools. To all that, Premium adds NewBlue Filters 5 Ultimate and Cinema LUTs Mystic effects.
For the real pros, there's Magix Video Pro X [$199], which offers professional-level capabilities such as three- and four-point editing, three-way color correction, broadcast-quality sound editing, and extended format support.
Free 30-day trial versions are available for all versions, but you're limited to three minutes of output per project and the free versions lack a lot of tools found in the paid versions, including most templates. Finally, the Movie Edit Touch app for Windows 10 and Android expands the product's reach.
How Do Magix's Prices Compare With the Competition?
The one-time pricing for Magix Movie Studio is slightly lower than most competitors' prices. We use list prices here, but you can often find them discounted.
CyberLink PowerDirector costs a bit more than Magix Movie Studio, with a $139 one-time price and a $6.25-per-month subscription option. Corel VideoStudio has two one-time price options, with the more feature-filled Ultimate costing $99.99 and the standard level at $79.99. Movavi Video Editor is $79.99 for its fullest [and only level], Pinnacle Studio has Standard [$59.99] and Ultimate [$129.99], and Wondershare Filmora is $99.99. In most cases with video editing software, you only get the greatest features with the top-end edition.
How to Get Started With Magix Movie Studio
Movie Studio requires a 64-bit version of Windows 10 or Windows 11, a 2.4GHz processor or better, 4GB RAM, graphics hardware with 512MB VRAM and DirectX 11 support, and a minimum of 2GB hard drive space.
To install the software, you first download a small stub installation app, and you get a choice of also installing Music Maker. The stub in turn downloads the 1.5GB video editing program and the music software. Downloading sample media and extra templates can add several more gigabytes depending on how much you want to install. I appreciate that there's a demo project you can download to show you how the program works. You must register the software with your contact information before you can use it.
An Attractive Interface, But Not the Most User-Friendly
On first running the program, you see the Create Project window, in which you can specify resolution, frame rate, file location, and other basic settings. The company has added Social Media formats here, including square and vertical 9:16. You now only see the "Create proxy files" option if you open the movie settings dialog later. It's a good choice for speeding up editing actions.
Magix Movie Studio's interface presents flat-style button icons for all the effect types, with gray borders and a near-black editing area. It's an attractive and clean interface. Unlike most video programs, Movie Studio puts its video preview panel at top left, with the content and effect source panel to the right. The source panel has tabs at top for Import, Effects, Templates, Audio, and Store. Except for Import, which shows your content folders, each tab opens colored tiles for included effects and media. You can change to a list view if you prefer.
As in competing products, the multitrack timeline takes up the full window width below the other panels. Buttons at the top-right of the timeline let you switch to storyboard view, as well as to a thumbnail view of your clips and multicam mode.
You can resize and even undock the panels and move them around to your taste. Be sure to press the Esc key or else the panel will continue to stick to your mouse cursor. Undo and Redo buttons sit clearly above the timeline, with Mouse and Ripple mode choices. The source section has tabs for Effects, Templates, Audio, and Store, as well as Import [which is really just a media source view]. There's a search bar in this panel, and with the latest update it now works within Effect sections—for example, search for the specific shape or direction you want for a wipe or blur.
You don't get a lot of guidance inside the program as you get started, though there is a website with tutorial videos. There are no in-app guided edit tutorials like those of Adobe Premiere Elements, but there is a sample video project to show off the program's possibilities like that offered in Pinnacle Studio. Note that this and many movie templates are only available in the paid version, not in the free trial.
Unlike Adobe Premiere Elements and Pinnacle Studio, Magix doesn't use top-level mode buttons to switch among importing and organizing content, editing, and outputting. There are buttons at the top left to switch between editing, burning disc projects, and uploading. Like Apple Final Cut Pro, Magix Movie Studio lets you include multiple movie sequences within a project. Tabs above the timeline let you switch among them, and a menu option lets you add, remove, or merge these project movies.
Organizing Content and Working With Magix'sTimeline
Magix doesn't have a clear Import procedure. Instead, the Import tab in the source panel simply shows the disk folder tree. There's no File > Import menu option or Import button to take you to a file picker as you get in most other video editing programs.
The program is missing some organization tools, too, such as tagging, let alone the auto-tagging you find in some products. But you can color tag clips and enter scene and take labels if you right-click on the clip and choose Object Properties.
The source panel doesn't show all clips in your timeline by default, which is strange and unhelpful. You have to right-click on the project entry and choose Show project contents. As with many things in this program, it's there, but it's not clearly accessible the way it is in other software.
If you create a new folder in Windows, it shows up under the Media entry in the Import tab, as long as you right-click it and choose Add link. An Android app called Camera MX lets you transfer from your phone over Wi-Fi. Test video clips from my iPhone 4K video still display upside down, something I've run into previously with PowerDirector. You can use the rotation tool to fix it, but it would be nice not to have to.
Dragging and dropping clips around the timeline feels snappy, and it's a cinch to move back and forth in the timeline or adjust its time scale with the mouse wheel. Hover the mouse cursor over any unfamiliar interface element, and a helpful tooltip fills you in on its function.
One minor annoyance is that you can't filter the source panel to display just video or just photos, as you can in most competing software. Another odd thing about the timeline is that if you play your movie, it keeps playing past any content in the tracks. So if you leave it unattended, you could find yourself far to the right of your video clips. You also need to authorize a content license online the first time you play an MP4 video clip, a minor inconvenience that other apps have mostly solved without requiring an interruption.
A small dropdown button at the track head lets you add, delete, and move tracks. If you enlarge the track head and click on it anywhere other than its buttons, you can name the track. It's useful for purposes like designating a track as your main movie, b-roll, effects, soundtrack, and so on. This capability isn't obvious, though, and you could easily miss it.
The Active Destination Track lets you click on a track header to give it focus, and when you drop a clip from your source with the insert button, the clip lands in the selected track exactly at the playhead position. PowerDirector does it, too, but that program handles the situation better when there's already content at the target location, asking whether you want to overwrite, insert, or replace the existing clip. When Magix encounters a track location that already contains media, it simply adds the new material to the end of the current track. Pinnacle Studio offers even more control in this area, with its 3- and 4-point editing tools.
The Simple Storyboard View
The storyboard view of your movie's clips offers more than most competitors' equivalents. Icons for text, sound volume, and transitions let you perform those actions. Frustratingly, however, I could not drag clip tiles to reposition them in the movie in storyboard view. It’s easy to do it in the timeline view, however. Moving around in and zooming the timeline seems natural using the mouse wheel. You can also easily drag and drop clips to different tracks and positions, but there's no editing mode that lets you move a clip in front of another while moving the second clip to the right. When you move a clip, it simply covers over the existing clip. I wish the video preview pane had an in-place pause button, however, since hitting stop also takes you to the beginning of the clip.
The preview window shows the time value for the playhead position and total clip time. You can easily switch between previewing the current source clip and the movie project using arrow icons in the source thumbnails. The keyboard arrow keys let you advance one frame at a time, though there's no on-screen button for it. An interesting difference from most other programs is the tab bar above the timeline, which lets you have multiple movies open at once.
Easy Digital Movies
Magix's templates resemble iTunes' Trailers, but to get them you have to go to Help > Download Extra Content, which amounts to several gigabytes. Many templates cost extra, as do some other effects like title animations and background music. To use templates, you fill placeholder thumbnails, which show descriptive diagrams of what should go in them. A panel on the right describes the desired content, such as Action, Close-Up, and Extreme Long Shot. There are 30 holes to fill in the Blockbuster template. Xs appear in the placeholder thumbnails, but you can't delete shot spaces you don't want.
Using this template added dramatic music timed to scene changes and added titles in my testing, but it wasn't as well thought out shot-wise as Premiere Elements' similar feature. Magix doesn't let you edit the content during this building process, even to crop or rotate. Once you move a template project to the full editor for customization, you lose the ability to see your project in the template anymore. In all, it's not a flexible or wizard-driven enough process.
Basic Video Editing in Magix
Most trimming in Magix is done right on the timeline with a razor icon for splitting the current track, which can be switched to Remove Start, Remove End, or Split Movie [to split all tracks at the same point]. While you're trimming a clip in the timeline, the preview window immediately shows the effect of the edit. Other software, such as PowerDirector and Premiere Elements, also work that way.
The Find and Close Gaps option worked as advertised in my test movie. I also like the choice, Fill Blank Space With Still Image, which merely extends the last frame of the clip. You could, of course, simply drop a photo onto the empty timeline space, but Magix's automated option is more effective since it's basically a freeze-frame.
For more precise edits, the Edit trimmer lets you fine-tune a transition between clips, and the Object Trimmer window lets you do so for the start and end of a single clip. The dialog for both these activities is fairly complex, with three panels and no fewer than 25 control buttons. I can see how it would be effective, though getting accustomed to it might take some time.
Unlike most video editing software, Magix doesn't include a Transition tab in the source panel. Instead, you have to hunt in the Templates tab to find them [the Effects tab might make more sense, which some other apps use for transitions]. Magix has happily joined the industry in calling transitions transitions instead of fades. You don't get the vast choice of transitions you get in PowerDirector. For your 3D projects, 10 Stereo fades are on offer. As in most good video editing software these days, you can drag a clip's corner to produce a cross dissolve transition—the most commonly used transition of all. The Edit Trimmer mentioned above offers detailed control over this type of transition. When you select a clip in the timeline [if it's long enough], you see a transition button that opens a panel of choices.
Full-Power Video Editing in Magix
Double-clicking on a clip's timeline entry opens the Effects panel, which offers text, lighting, color, chroma-key, distortion, speed, lens correction [barrel and pincushion adjustment], and movement effects such as size/position and rotation. Some presets offer cool [or goofy, depending on your point of good] motion effects. Magix offers motion-tracking like that in Corel VideoStudio Pro X9, which lets you follow an onscreen object with an image, text, or effect. More on that in a moment.
Magix's Stabilization tool has a very sparse interface, showing only an Analyze button to start. Once you run it, the button changes to read Clear Motion Data. After running the tool on my test clip, rather than smoothing my camera jerking, the result was wiggly and worse than the original video. The old stabilization tool was superior, offering more adjustments of the effect. Users of the Premium edition can take advantage of the proDAD Mercalli plug-in, which offers even more control and a more stable result.
Magix has Project Marker and Snap Markers to remind you of important locations in your movie, but they differ from standard keyframes, which the program also supports. Keyframes comprise a powerful video editing technique in Movie Studio. This technique lets you smoothly progress an effect, title, crop, and so on, from one point in a movie to another. In Magix, you can use these with some effects, though not all. Also, the keyframe markers don't appear in the main timeline; they only appear at the bottom of the Effect panel. PowerDirector, by contrast, has recently made a push to make everything keyframe-able, and its implementation is clearer.
Minimal Motion Tracking
Magix Movie Studio's motion tracking lets an object follow something that moves around the screen in your video clip. You can use an overlay, such as text, or an effect, such as blur. Tracking is often used to obfuscate license plates or body parts. Magix uses the term Object Tracking.
Unlike Corel VideoStudio, which presents a clear motion-tracking button above the timeline, in Magix Movie Studio you have to hunt for the tool. It's hidden in the right-click context menu when you have an object selected in the timeline below a video clip. You choose Attach to Picture Position in the Video, but only after you position the object or text.
After you find the tool, a long-winded dialog box tells you to "Select a picture section for which movements should follow the overlay object." I did, and the text box followed the football player I'd attached it to. But there's no dialog box where you can refine the effect, and adding a tracked blur overlay is much harder than in competing apps. The whole process is way less intuitive than what you get in Corel VideoStudio, which even lets you do multipoint tracking. What's more, Magix doesn't show you the actual track or let you edit it the way Corel does.
Plenty of Advanced Movie Effects
Titles
Title templates included in Movie Studio are categorized by their use, for example, intro/outro, caption, and subtitles. The upper two editions of Movie Studio also include animated titles from NewBlue. There are now more than 50 3D title animations, and you can apply simple horizontal and vertical animation to any text you add. Some of them look pretty cool, but you can't edit their 3D aspects like depth or angle.
Video Effects
Movie Studio's Effects panel offers an Artistic filter, with controls for Erosion, Dilate, Emboss, Substitution [for colors], Quantize, Colorize, and Contour. You can get some zany looks with these. The Distortion tool offers Whirlpool, Fisheye, and Kaleidoscope effects, among others, all of which you can combine into one unrecognizable vision.
You can also add objects, such as arrows or a cigar. More downloadable effects and objects include a cartooner, a de-interlacer, noise reduction, and a liquid effect. The extra effects aren't as well integrated into the program as CyberLink PowerDirector's plug-ins.
Movie Studio's Film Looks retro and tone effects can give your picture added impact. Other choices include three Cinema looks, Cold, Warm, Fresh, Tilt Shift, and Vignette. You can easily add plug-in effects with a right-click menu option. Chroma-keying is well implemented in the software.
Multicam
This advanced technique takes some preparation to use in the Magix software and it's not straightforward. Audio-based synchronization and an increase in the allowable camera angles to four are highlights of this version. Performance slowed down during my testing, making angle switching not as precise as I'd like, but at least you can make adjustments after the fact in the new timeline tracks the process creates.
Time Stretching
Time stretching is easy in Magix, with its Stretching toolbar button, which can fit a clip to another track's length, either by slowing it or speeding it up. You can also go to the Speed effect and plug in a value from 0.25 to 4x. Time stretching speeds up the audio without changing its pitch, while the Resampling option lets you turn your subject into one of the Chipmunks.
Picture-in-Picture
Under design elements effects are 25 picture-in-picture [or PiP] presets, such as 2/1 left, 4/3 top left. It would be nicer to see visual representations for these as PowerDirector gives you. As with that app, you can also simply adjust the size and position of each track for a custom PiP. I like how easy it is to rotate video, from the Rotation/Mirror effect.
Two video effect panels deal with color—Color, and Color correction. The first offers a white-point dropper, a color wheel, and an auto-color button, along with sliders for each of the primary colors and saturation. This lets you easily correct a shot, for example, to remove a greenish cast.
The color correction tools let you create a mask by clicking on, say, a sky, and then intensifying the blue of just that area. But you don't get an equivalent to Premiere Elements' three-way color correction, which lets you separately adjust color for low-, high-, and mid-tones. The Shot Match tool lets you do what its name says, taking a source color scheme and applying it to a target frame. In my testing, it did the opposite of that, however, taking the target's color profile and applying it to the source. No matter which source and target I selected, it always adjusted the colors in one direction.
Travel Maps
Several years ago, Apple wowed the vacation video-editing world with iMovie's automated intros showing a plane crossing a map to indicate where you were traveling. It harked to old-time movies, but was effective, nevertheless. The Magix Travel Maps is a separate included application that does something similar, though it's far less automatic.
Though it's not very intuitive to use, nor is it automated, the feature [called Travel Route in the video editor and Travel Maps in its separate app] offers several map styles and works with high-DPI monitors. You can buy extra-cost maps and animations, not a bad idea if you want good results. When you figure out how to create an animated route, saving it adds it to the end of your timeline. I'd prefer it be added to the end of the currently selected clip, though.
3D Editing
The third dimension has fallen out of favor lately when it comes to video, but Magix lets you easily import 3D footage and apply 3D titles and effects. You can adjust vertical and horizontal alignment. The program supports anaglyph and interlaced 3D.
Decent Audio Editing Tools
Magix Movie Studio can display the waveform for each clip in the timeline, and a full mixer pops up when you click its icon on the top-right corner of the timeline. A full-fledged sound editor, Magix Music Editor, can clean audio and apply noise reduction, equalizing, compression, and stereo FX. It's pretty advanced, letting you choose a noise sample, optimize for voice, de-hiss, and remove camera noise. It also lets you convert older media, such as LPs, to digital.
A good selection of background music for soundtracks is available on the Audio tab of the source panel. One audio tool lets you add reverb and echo. I got a football game to sound like it was in a swimming hall. You can also raise or lower pitch, or change the tempo of music. The included synthesizer can add a variety of sounds—flowing water, wind, traffic, crowds, applause—fun stuff. A drum and bass synth turns you into your movie's DJ. For slideshows, there are dozens of background tracks included.
With Magix's beat-based editing, the program can decide when to switch clips based on the background music's beat. You do this by opening the Snap Markers tool on the Effects tab and tapping it like a drum to show it the strong beats in the music. After this, when you drag clips or trim them near the snap marks, they'll automatically snap to those points in the timeline. It's not exactly automatic, but I can see how it could be useful, especially to action cam users.
Capable 360 Video Editing
Movie Edit Pro was among the first video editing software capable of editing 360-degree content. To test its VR prowess, I loaded some footage from a Samsung Gear 360 camcorder. I was also able to open a clip from the Ricoh Theta S in Magix.
When you start a project, the Movie Settings dropdown offers 360-degree options. With a clip selected in the timeline, you can choose the 360-degree Panorama section and muck around with the clip's viewing angle on three axes. The software can stitch video to create 360 degrees, for example from shooting simultaneously with two or more GoPro cameras. You can also adjust the video's perspective [you're really just zooming] and fisheye/barrel distortion. You can output to pan-able video formats like those found on Facebook and Vimeo.
Magix includes stitching and stabilization for 360 VR content, which is pretty impressive. The stabilization worked as well as these tools usually do, smoothing some bumps out, but sometimes adding a wobbly look in their place. Movie Studio also lets you move titles around in 360-degree space, though doing so isn't as straightforward as in PowerDirector, which also offers motion tracking and transitions for 360 content.
Good Output and Sharing Options
Movie Studio offers decent output options, including direct uploading to Vimeo and YouTube from the up-arrow button at top right. As your movie uploads, a progress bar crawls across the bottom of the screen and shows time remaining. Format choices from here are limited, with only four quality levels and three file formats [WMV, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4]. Choosing File / Export Movie gets you a lot more detailed format options.
Full disc authoring with menus and chapters is provided, and you can output to most standard video file formats, including 4K and H.265. Simple device output options include High Resolution and Low Resolution for iOS and Android.
Fast Performance, But...
Magix supports graphics hardware acceleration for editing [with support for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs]; the latest version uses this for rendering, too. It automatically detected and used my graphics processor to deliver one of the fastest speeds on my test. Working with clips in the timeline—even 4K and 8K clips—is very snappy, but I experienced a couple of unexpected program shutdowns early on. On restart, it offers to send a crash report to Magix for evaluation and remediation.
For render speed testing, each program joins seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p all the way up to 8K, and applies cross-dissolve transitions between them all. I then note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264, a bit rate of 15-16Mbps and 192Kbps audio. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I run this test on a Windows 11 PC sporting a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
As you can see, Magix Movie Studio was third among all video editors tested. Only Wondershare Filmora and Adobe Premiere Pro rendered my test project faster, so rendering speed shouldn't be a concern with Magix, as long as you have decent graphics hardware.
Magix: Making Movie Magic?
It's likely that Magix Movie Studio has most of what you need for an enthusiast-level digital movie project, with many powerful effects, multicam, 360-degree support, and audio editing tools. Though its interface has improved and its rendering speed is now near the top among competing products, it still lacks the stability and smooth workflows found in competitors, especially for media organization and advanced effects like motion tracking.
Our Editors' Choice winners for enthusiast-level video editing applications, CyberLink PowerDirector and Corel VideoStudio, are more stable and make getting the effects you want easier to find and use. If you're on the macOS platform, both Apple iMovie [for entry-level] and Final Cut Pro [for serious amateurs and professionals] are Editors' Choice selections, too. Adobe Premiere Pro works on both platforms and is our Editors' Choice for professionals.