Product Reviews

Magix's Movies on CD & DVD 4 is aimed at novices who want to edit home movies and burn them to disc. It's similar to CyberLink's PowerDirector (reviewed on page 53) but is half the price.

As you would expect from a product aimed at beginners, the interface is clear and straightforward. A simple timeline running across the bottom of the page houses your video clips. You can import video footage directly from your hard disk or record it from another source such as a DV camera, analogue video capture card or TV tuner. It's easy to use, although the file import option could do with a preview

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option so that you don't have to rely on filenames.

The software provides a range of effects that you can apply to each clip, including mirroring along the vertical axis and flipping the image. None of the effects is processor intensive, so you can apply them in real time and turn them off with the click of a button.

The editing tools are rather basic: you can pause a video clip part way through and choose to delete the beginning or end, or split the clip in two, but that's all. There's a new Story Maker mode, though, which contains thumbnail previews of effects and video enhancements, including video softening and automatic of brightness and contrast adjustment. These are easy to use, but a drag-and-drop method would make them easier to apply and make it more obvious which effects have been applied to a clip.

Magix provides online help, which is fine except that many of the screenshots and some text is in German. Some of the items in English have been translated incorrectly, too, which makes it even harder to follow.

For basic video editing, Movies on CD & DVD 4 is easy to use, but we recommend you spend a bit more on Adobe's Premiere Elements.