ADVICE: Choosing editing software

[rhegedus]

@Braindrain

I've read them - I'm not trying to be argumentative or bloody minded, but it does work.

[ZQX]

Magix Pro or 15?
Magix is gaining ground...just not here

The latest - Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 Plus. Looks fabulous. I'll give the trial download a good test-drive then if all is well I'll order the box version from amazon (apparently the box version comes loaded with bonus add-on stuff, while the download version is stripped down).

EDIT: I don't know why Magix MEP is not mentioned more around here. Everyone seems to laud Vegas - rightly so for the $1000 Pro version, but the mpeg2 encoding limitations of the Studio version make it next to useless!? Unfortunately I don't have $1000 to splurge.

[Braindrain]

Surely the best method is to encode from the timeline, rather than render an intermediary file? I thought Vegas Movie Studio, with its high-quality Mainconcept encoder, would be perfect for me until I realized how severely limited its mpeg2 encoding was.

Actually, the best results will be obtained from saving to the same file type and encoding to MPEG2/whatever separately. I'm not talking about an intermediate codec.

From my experience, MCE is decent but not the best. IMO, CCE or Procoder (<- my preference) gets better results. Even TMPGEnc will get similar results to MCE and it'll be a lot cheaper.

However, depends on how fanatical you are about achieving the best results...