This is an open letter to Klaus Schmidt, Managing Director of MAGIX.

Dear Herr Schmidt:

This is a request for Magix to add support for Nvidia's NEVC hardware encoder in Movie Edit Pro. (Which supports both H.264 and H.265 hardware encoding.) It should be easy to implement and it should take only a week for your smart developers to do. (All the files are already available and free. All it would take is a command line translator, as you probably already do for the MainConcepts encoder. And that command-line work has been done already, as documented below.) Adding support for Nvidia's NEVC  would put Magix above your competition.

Look, I know that Magix is focused on supporting hardware video encoding via Intel's 5th (and 6th) Generation CPU. But there are a few problems with that narrow path.

First, a LOT of your loyal customers (like me) don't have Intel processors. Nor do we plan to upgrade to one.

Upgrading to an Intel processor would cost me a lot of money. I would have to buy a new motherboard and DDR4 RAM. Even if I had the extra $800 USD, it would take me a week to reinstall Windows on a new motherboard with all my applications. So I'm not going to upgrade. My old quad core AMD runs just fine at 3.8 GHz, and I don't plan to upgrade for a long time. (I plan to stay with Windows 7 until at least 2020, like a lot of people.) So there is no benefit to me when Magix ONLY supports H.264/265 hardware encoding through Intel CPU's.

Question: How many of your customers are going to upgrade to 5th or 6th Generation processors just to use Magix? Answer: very few. So why offer a feature that very few can use?

Second, your competition, like Cybermedia's PowerDirector and Corel's VideoStudio are also focusing on hardware encoding via Intel CPU's ONLY. (VideoStudio requires a 6th Generation CPU.) So there's nothing to distinguish Movie Edit Pro from its competition.

As with cars on the Autobahn, speed sells. Even though I believe that Movie Edit Pro has the best GUI and is more powerful than the competition, it is slow in the Computer Magazine reviews. Wouldn't it be better for Magix to be faster than its competition? NEVC is amazingly fast.

A lot of your customers already have the newer Nvidia graphics cards, like the Nvidia GTX960, that can do hardware H.264/265. (And, as I presume you know, Nvidia will soon be selling a 6GB GTX1060 for about the same price of the GTX960!) Even if they don't, this is an easier upgrade path than a new Intel CPU, mobo and DRAM.

These second generation Maxwell (and now Pascal) chips support hardware encoding - both H.264 and H.265. And unlike the bad experience that Magix had with the old Nvidia CUDA cores, users on the web report that Nvidia's NEVC encoder does high quality encodes. (I can confirm this myself.)

Nvidia has already made available the files that Magix needs to encode via NEVC. (Only one executable and four dll's are needed.) They can be pulled from the Nvidia SDK https://developer.nvidia.com/video-sdk-601. Or they can be pulled from the StaxRip project files. https://github.com/stax76/staxrip

The executable is command line driven. But the StaxRip project has already broken those commands out for you. (Also documented in the Nvidia SDK.)

All that your developers would have to do is to send the Magix video output to the NEVC encoder in the same way that I presume you already send video output to MainConcept's encoder. (The audio demux/mux would stay the same.) I can't imagine this taking more than a week for your software developers to add to MEP.

If Magix supported Nvidia's NEVC hardware encoding, it would be the only video editing program to do so. It would make Magix incredibly fast, probably putting it in first place in the Reviews. That would sell more licenses. That means more profit for not very much cost of development.

Please consider adding this support.

Mike <><