Magix Video Easy for editing

david-s48 wrote on 10/28/2016, 2:27 PM

Thanks in advance but I wonder if anyone can help me with this question about Magix Video Easy.
I recently finished copying to DVD all my childrens video camera recordings that I had put onto VHS tapes. To cut a long story short I now have 18 hours of these recordings on 18 DVD's! I always intended editing the recordings of their concerts, activities, etc but like a lot of people, I never got around to it!
Has anyone on the forum ever used Magix Video Easy to carry out the sort of editing I want to do which is to end up with 1 or 2 hours of the highlights. I think sitting through hours of recordings where not a lot really happens would be like unbearable - akin to been forced to watch someone's holiday video!
After much research I came across this software and although I think it will fit the bill, has anyone on the forum used it for this sort of editing?
I have looked on the forum for answers to this question but I cannot seem to see any other postings on this subject - please excuse me if I have missed any such ones!
I really just want an easy basic program to edit and perhaps clean up the recordings (technology was not like digital recordings are today) that the DVD recorder has created - it seems to have created on each DVD 1 x VOB menu file (so that you can tell the DVD player to go straight to a chapter created when I copied the recordings on to the DVD - I tried to breakup the various recordings depending upon the action captured when videoing the kids) and 4 VOB files of approx. 1gb each.
After this I then want to export the edited highlights back onto archival DVD's.
Can anyone advise.
Thanks

i am using Windows 7

Comments

browj2 wrote on 10/28/2016, 5:40 PM

Hi David,

You're going to find us quite biased here. I would not recommend Video Easy or Movie Edit Pro basic, but definitely Movie Edit Pro Plus for what you want to do. With the first two, you quickly run into limitations, and the thing that you really want to do is not available, so spend a bit more. If you look at how much time that you are going to spend on the project(s), the extra cost is not really much.

There is a learning curve with every program, so you will have to do some learning as well.

What you are proposing to do is probably what most of us do, get the old videos into a new format and edited to look good and not too long.

You will find a lot of video noise with VHS. We didn't use to notice this, but now we do because we have HD TV and we expect good quality. There is a plugin called Neat Video that that some of us use to reduce the video noise. It is quite amazing and works nicely with Movie Edit Pro.

As well, if you need some stabilization because the camera was not steady, Movie Edit Pro Plus comes with Mercalli V2 stabilization, and it will smooth out the jerkiness of most videos.

Finally, you may want to clean up sound and maybe add in some music in places. MEP has excellent tools for this.

And there is a lot more, which you will discover as you go along.

To get started, you can place the VOB files on your hard disk, and then open time in MEP and either edit on the timeline, cutting out unwanted parts, or pre-editing by bringing in ranges of only the parts wanted.

Just remember that MEP, like all other editors, is non-destructive. It uses the source files, which must always be available, and it does not modify them.

Let us know if you need help. There is already a wealth of information in the forum and under the Tutorials tab. We can point you in the right direction.