Many questions and issues with MEP 2015 Plus

floridagal wrote on 11/8/2014, 10:04 PM

What is the difference between a "movie arrangement" and a "project"? The file management system is very confusing. When I edit a movie and save it, then open it later, it is not there, but somehow defaults to an earlier project. Have tried to save and then save as to keep the most recent edits in place, but MEP still seems to pull earlier versions of the project into the arranger when I try to finish editing the movie. I did not have this issue with MEP 16 Plus.

My downloaded version of MEP 2015 didn't have the Intros/Outros or other design elements. When I emailed Magix about this, they had me download those parts -- which took 2 hours to download!?!

The burn screen caused a freeze/crash and failed to burn a project after taking 6 hours to encode, and since then when I try to open Magix it says it's already open.

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, on an HP Pavilion Elite HPE 440f PC with a terrabyte of memory. My hard drive still shows 600+ Gigabytes available. 8GB DDR3 system memory Intel Core i5-760 Processor. ATI Radeon HD 5570 Series Graphics w 1 GB DDR3 dedicated graphics memory.

Cannot find a way to burn the project as a disk image the way I could on my MEP 16 Plus version.

Comments

browj2 wrote on 11/9/2014, 12:34 AM

Hi,

1. Let's start with the definitions:

In MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 2015 you will be working with "projects", "movies" and "objects". In order to work quickly and intuitively, it is important to know the differences between these three hierarchically-ordered terms.

Project

A "Project" includes everything that you want to include on a disc. Normally this means one or more movies and a menu structure for selecting movies for playback. Projects can be saved as "MVP" files on your hard drive and can be loaded later to do further editing to the movies.

Movie

A "Movie" can be one single video clip or a combination of clips and photos. It can also include music, titles, transitions and much more. Each movie can be exported individually as a video. The "project" can be considered a type of drawer into which you can put multiple movies that will be edited together and burned to the same disc.

An arrangement of various objects (videos, photos, text, sound, etc.) is called a movie. A movie file has an "mvm" extension. Thus an arrangement is what you put on the timeline. The lower window of the screen, the timeline or storyboard area, where you create your arrangement, is also known as the Arranger.

Objects

"Objects" are the individual units of the movie. There are different types of objects (view page 98): videos, photos, titles, transitions, decorative elements, audio (sound).

Summary: "Projects“ contain "Movies“ and "Movies“ contain "Objects“.

This is all almost straight out of the manual, which you should read or at least refer to.

2. Project not saving changes - I presume that this is what you mean. Does this happen with just 1 project or more than 1? A backup is saved by default, unless you changed the default, every 10 minutes. Did you check the last saved backup to see if it contains your changes? Did you make a test project and check it by closing and restarting MEP2015 a couple of times after making obvious changes and saving each? Same problem?

I have not had this problem, at least not yet.

3. Download - assuming that you purchased on-line, check your email that you received where it probably says to click on the link for more information on the installation and activation of the Red Giant plugins. Did you check it?

I don't recall if the start up screen after entering my serial number asked me if I wanted to download the add-ons. I suspect that it did and I did so. If you said no, then the only way is to go to Help, Free download.

It is often not obvious that you have to download the additional files/modules and plugins. If you had read some of the posts here, you would have found that we are repeatedly teilling people to click on Help, Free download and get all of the extras that are not downloaded with the program. This is not new; it has to be done with most Magix programs. You would not be happy waiting for 2 or 3 hours just to get the program and all of the extras. The extras are much larger than the program. Take a look at the size of the files by clicking on the Free download again. You will see them all, and you will see that you have already downloaded them. You can even chose which extras that you want to download in a session. Note that they get installed individually as downloaded. Download time depends on your internet connection and often the load on the download server. You have the choice of downloading huge files that takes 2 hours, or not downloading anything, thus saving time, but being unhappy because you don't have the content. No pain, no gain.

4. Burn problems - this seems to be a recurring problem. Check through the other posts here by searching for 2015 and looking at only MEP. check also under the Forum tab and going to "All about MAGIX's programs" then "Move Edit Pro" to see how others have resolved their problems. Magix has indicated that there are problems with exporting and burning because of MicroSoft updates that have caused conflicts. They are working to resolve these, however, there may be workarounds and you should explore these.

5. Encode in directory - when you get to the DVD Burning screen to actually burn to a DVD, click on the button Encode in directory and give a folder location for the DVD files to be encoded. Do not put a DVD in the drive. Click on the burn button. If you look at the folder after it is done, you will see that it contains all of the files (VOB) that would be burned to a disk. Now go to back to the editor, not the DVD menu screens. Click on the top menu, File, Burn CD/DVD, and select "Burn copy of an already created video disc." Navigate to your folder (or any other compiled video folder) and select it. Then create the DVD (now put a disc in the DVD burner). I have found that trying to do both steps at once sometimes causes problems with burning, so I always encode first and burn later.

There is another way to burn using Speed burnR, which is essentially the same as the last step. You can access this from the DVD menu screen by clicking on File, Burn files to CD DVD and following the instructions.

Let us know if you still have problems burning. I recall a solution that called for reducing the bit rate or something. I will look it up.

6. Crashing - sometimes you have to reboot to resolve the problem of the program saying that it is already loaded. I have had this problem with Video Pro X6 occasionally. It and MEP2015 share the same engine and likely many of the same problems.

Lastly, you indicated that you have "an HP Pavilion Elite HPE 440f PC with a terrabyte of memory." No, you have an HP Pavilion Elite HPE 440f PC with 8 GB of memory. The hard disk would have 1 TB.

cpc000cpc wrote on 11/9/2014, 12:36 AM

floridagal,

1. A project can contain one or more movies which will have their own entries on a DVD menu. Each movie can have further division into chapters. Multi movie projects show as tabs above the timelines.

You have to be alert to the names you give when you save things! If you create a multi movie project by opening additional movies and adding them to a project the default project name will be the name of the first movie opened. A technique many use is to give a unique name every time they do some editing and save eg Holiday_edit01, Holiday_edit02 etc. When a project is finished it's easy enough to delete earlier versions.

2. Having additional downloads for Intros/Outros etc make perfect sense. If they came attached to the program everyone would have to wait 2 (or many more) hours to get the main program even if they didn't want the extras.

3. Sorry Iv'e not the experience to comment on burning crashes -- I only export as MPEG etc. If you get a message that MEP is already open you may need to go to the Windows task manager to force the closure of the bits that somehow got left behind.

4. Nice kit!

5. Disc image option is available from the dropdown on the DVD burn window:

Regards,

Carl

floridagal wrote on 11/20/2014, 11:06 AM

Thank you John and Carl for your detailed responses to my questions. I found them both helpful.

1.) However, I'm still experiencing some issues with the file management. I split a project into two movies to simplify the editing. When I do a "save as" of the project, it seems to work. But then, when I access it again to do further editing, it brings up three tabs above the timeline: the first tab on the left is Part 1, another is Part 2, (or vice versa) and the third is the file name I had saved the project to -- except that this tab is empty! I had no such problems with MEP 16. Have spent over a month reading the manual, and other threads in the forum, trying to figure this out.

My goal has been to produce a movie of our recent trip and burn several copies to Blu ray discs for the others who had accompanied us. (Before that I tried burning the project onto two DVD disks, but the resolution was not clear, and peoples' faces were like blobs.)

2.) After the burn screen froze and crashed a number of times, and the templates weren't responsive, I was finally able to burn both movies onto a Blu ray disc the other day -- but the burn menu screen shows 3 movies, of which one is totally empty. The final menu page shows two parts with images, and a third part which is black. Was afraid to delete the empty file, because its title was the one I had given to the project as the final "save as" version.?!?

3.) Another problem is that the title editor has ceased to work. When I try to add a title to a video object instead of a broken line box appearing that I can type text into, what I get is a black box, with the check mark and delete button in white in the upper right corner. Any text I type is invisible as I'm typing it. When I then click on the check mark, the text appears but also the word "title" and sometimes the text repeats and repeats until I delete the whole thing.

4.) A fourth issue is that drag and drop doesn't work for me. To get an object from the media pool to the arranger, I have to get it first into the preview screen and try several times to get it from there down to the tracks.

Thanks again for your help. Any suggestions?