As a longtime video editor, while I tend to use the bigger brand of video editing software, I also often like to look what is available for those who don’t want to pay a subscription, nor do they want to spend hundreds on.
If anything, software that they can purchase and install and it would cost under $50.
I decided to review the MAGIX Movie Studio 2025 Suite Premium Edition which is made in Germany. MAGIX is a company that is known for being the new owner of VEGAS as of 2016. So, the company definitely has a video editing history.
This software allows for multi-cam editing for 4 cameras, detailed color correction, 1,500 effects, titles, templates and fades, automatic look adjustment, chroma keying with Boris FX Chroma Key Studio. Also, you get MAGIX Travel Maps.
Also, this software allows for AI for voiceovers and subtitles at a touch of a button.
Now I am going to approach this software as a budget consumer. Not going to compare it with the big brand video editing software I have used professionally but do it as a person who needs to get videos up for editing, may it be for YouTube or presentation work.
The first thing you will notice is that you would need to input the code on your software and then go to the website to complete the installation and get the latest update. It does take a while to download and update, so just come back a few hours later to make sure everything is running correctly.
Immediately, it was easy to get a new project going and selecting HDTV and FullHD 1080p worked easily. But noticed they have sections such as UHD/UHD2, HDTV, social media, 360 degrees and SD Pal NTC to break things down further.
So, I decided to do a simple TikTok or YouTube Short to edit.
Testing on a 30 minute video, I then proceeded to move the video by dragging but noticed that while I could drag to the main window, you want to drag to the timeline and make sure Timeline Mode is selected on the bottom right above the timeline.
I was able to separate audio and video and immediately start slicing part of the video that I didn’t want via the scissor logo above the timeline and then separate video from audio with the chain unlink. So far, so good.
Did notice that it takes a while as the software utilizes your CPU immediately to start rendering any changes.
I then experimented with the effects, especially with the “Speed” button to reverse video, the AI Styletransfer and when I start seeing Hokusai, Picasso and van Gogh, to name a few, to change the video to a certain style, I found that interesting. And more. MAGIX does give you a lot of effects to work with!
While cool to see effects, the main one that I really care about aside from title editing and the ability to do transitions and fade outs and was happy to see their templates plentiful.
I started to test the dynamic titles, which I was happy to see more than a dozen of options. Audio editing did not have many choices than what I would hoped. Sometime pitch or room changes, but realized that may be where Magix other software, Magix Music Maker is best for.
But I realized that a lot of the cool effects, you have to pay for it. One good thing about the shop is the connection to royalty free music and sounds which is a major plus and they are not that expensive. I will say that Magix offers the most royaltyfree music/sounds than other software at the same pricepoint.
One thing that has changed from 2024 to 2025 is the access to the MAGIX HUB and with Movie Studio 2025 Suite, you get 2 hours/year, 30,000 characters a year, while if you upgrade to Movie Studio Suite 365, you get 6 yours year, 1.2 million characters. But I will say that having tested the Text to Speech and also switch to Japanese to make a newscaster type voice was pretty cool!
But now the rendering. The most important part and each time I tried to render videos, it would crash my computer. I’ve rendered a lot of videos on different software and I would figure my higher end laptop (even though it’s a few years old now), would still be able to render video with ease. But I would get a non-responding. I did a restart and actually did another video in full 16:9 and it worked.
I did a few tweaks which my laptop allows for overclocking and also testing with no programs opened and that does help. But I never had to do that with other programs before but all programs work differently and I accepted that. But I will say, I don’t think I have used a video editing software that would crash on me that often, so I have been perusing the Magix community forums and possibly I may need to not use my Nvidia graphics card. But I hope this is not the case.
Going back to the rendering though, I did notice that for a hour video, it took many hours to render at 1080p. I like the flexibility to select how many fps and many selections of rendering choices, but again, that is probably something that is more MAGIX Vegas Pro than MAGIX Movie Studio 2025.
For the most part, to do a lot of things I usually need to do via video editing, you can do on MAGIX Movie Studio 2025 Suite Premium Edition. I think for the price, it’s definitely worth it for anyone who wants to get into video editing and get things posted on social media but also for one’s own personal video projects. It’s a very intuitive software that offers a lot.
But of course, for multi-track layering and the more project workflow oriented software, this is where you may want to look at MAGIX Vegas Pro 22 (this is the latest version as of August 2022). This gives one more to work with for both video and audio and more AI integration. The AI touches on Movie Studio 2025 are more plug-in like filters, while the text to speech was something I really liked a lot. The technology is getting better and the large number of selections of voices and regions is fantastic.
But both are apples and oranges. Apples and oranges maybe fruit but they are different. Same as Movie Studio 2025 Suite at under $50 and Vegas Pro 2022 Suite at under $250.
If you really want more hands in on video editing, especially for career wise. Then going with Vegas is more ideal, while those who are just wanting to do a little more than the basics of video editing but want to keep their budget to under $50 and just enough to get a job done, MAGIX Movie Studio 2025 Suite Premium Edition does offer a lot of bang for your buck. But I will say that the amount of crashing and long wait times while using this software does concern me a lot, what I am experiencing, others may not have this issue and will take me some time to fully delve into and figure out what is causing the crashing issues or possibly a bad install.
But I do recommend it for its features alone and for its under $50 price tag!
