Magix Movies on CD & DVD 2.0 test and review from Computer Video Magazine

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Magix Movies on CD & DVD 2.0

From basic video editing to DVD creation at under £30 - is it Magix?

Over the past year, there has been a rapid expansion in the range of software available to video editors on a tight budget - with offerings from Apple, Canopus, Pinnacle, Serif and Ulead, among others. We've looked at a great many of these programs, including software for editing and DVD authoring. Magix, like most of its competitors, provides both. Video Deluxe 2.0 Plus has a rather non-conformist appearance, but offers a lot for the money - under £60 (inc VAT). While this includes basic DVD authoring, its strength is in its editing functions. In contrast, Magix' latest offering, Movies on CD & DVD 2.0, reviewed here, is a Jack-of-all-trades. It provides video capture/import, editing functions and DVD burning, all for under £30.
On paper at least, Movies on CD & DVD 2.0 offers all the key functions needed by a desktop video editor. These include the capture of video - analogue or DV, depending on the installed capture hardware in the host PC - editing and arranging of footage along a timeline, and burning of VCD, SVCD, Mini-DVD and DVD discs, with menu structures based on user-defined scenes within the footage.
It can import a wide variety of video, image and audio file formats (including MOV, AVI, MPEG-1/2, WAV, MP3, BMP and JPG, and - if Codecs are installed - DivX, too). Finished projects can be exported to hard disk - again AVI, MOV and MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are supported, with MPEG encoding courtesy of the Ligos GoMotion engine.

Conclusion
As an editing environment, Movies on CD & DVD 2.0 is very basic by modern standards, even when compared to some of the other budget (sub-£100) packages we have looked at over recent months. What it does do, however, it does in a straightforward manner, and operation seems fairly solid.
It is likely that anybody with ambitious editing plans would quickly find the program limiting. But, for the home enthusiast simply looking to do some basic editing before transferring family videos to DVD with a minimum of fuss, the editing functions are quite adequate. And, at the price-point it's pitched at, this complete capture-edit-burn solution represents reasonable value.

John Walden

Read the full review in May 2004's Computer Video magazine.

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Reviewed in this issue:

Pinnacle ShowCenter
Canon MVX3i
CyberLink PowerProducer 2.0
Magix Movies on CD & DVD 2.0
Pure Motion EditStudio 4
Shining CitiDisk DV
Ulead DVD Workshop 2
Wacom Graphire 3 Studio XL

In this issue's news:

Video Forum 2004
Task-centric Creator 7
Apple GarageBand
Cut-price Canon cams
Desktop spanning over a network
Affordable rostrum camera software


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