Magix Movie Edit Pro 2016 Premium review – great video stabilisation

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.