Interesting news: MAGIX Insolvency

[John Vere]

12 hours ago, User 905133 said:

thought Movie Maker was a Windows Product. 

Sorry it’s called Movie Studio. 
The installer is dreadful and will install a ton of bloatware if you let it.
For the cheap price it costs you get the Movie editor as well as full version of Sound Forge and then a DAW I forget it’s name. But there’s way too much weird other stuff too. And then it nags you to install it later! 

[Xoo]

Their naming conventions for Movie Maker/Studio/Sausage Factory (hell, I can't remember) is also confusing: I bought one which I thought was an upgrade to what was Vegas and it turned out to be a cut-down version.  Caveat emptor.

[user 905133]

1 minute ago, John Vere said:

Sorry it’s called Movie Studio. 
The installer is dreadful and will install a ton of bloatware if you let it.
For the cheap price it costs you get the Movie editor as well as full version of Sound Forge and then a DAW I forget it’s name. But there’s way too much weird other stuff too. And then it nags you to install it later! 

Thanks for the clarification. I have the manual for Sony's Screenblast Movie Studio (2003).  I am sure I test drove the software when I first got it, but I have no files on my current computers.  There might be some tests I did on an XP SP3 PC.  For a few years I played around with Nero software, even tested editing some OBS captures with it.

[John Vere]

1 hour ago, Xoo said:

Their naming conventions for Movie Maker/Studio/Sausage Factory (hell, I can't remember) is also confusing: I bought one which I thought was an upgrade to what was Vegas and it turned out to be a cut-down version.  Caveat emptor.

I think this is exactly what just happened to me with the upgrade to 2023. I assumed it was the new update. No it seems totally striped down and completly weird layout. Dupped again. I really like Filmora compared to Resolve.  So I just need to stop working long enough to figure it out. I actually went looking for an older version of Vegas thinking they were probably more stable! That's like being a Sonar 8.5 hold out! 

[craigb]

3 hours ago, Xoo said:

Their naming conventions for Movie Maker/Studio/Sausage Factory (hell, I can't remember) is also confusing: I bought one which I thought was an upgrade to what was Vegas and it turned out to be a cut-down version.  Caveat emptor.

Kind of like thinking a Ford Pinto:

...was an upgrade to a Ford Bronco!

 

?

 

[msmcleod]

On 3/28/2024 at 5:57 PM, John Vere said:

I think this is exactly what just happened to me with the upgrade to 2023. I assumed it was the new update. No it seems totally striped down and completly weird layout. Dupped again. I really like Filmora compared to Resolve.  So I just need to stop working long enough to figure it out. I actually went looking for an older version of Vegas thinking they were probably more stable! That's like being a Sonar 8.5 hold out! 

IIRC... MAGIX had a product called Movie Maker... they then rebadged it as Movie Studio.  Then they bought Vegas, and released a "lite" version and called it Movie Studio, and renamed the previous Movie Studio back to Movie Maker.  Then the Vegas team found maintaining two versions of Vegas was seriously hampering their productivity, so Movie Studio became the next upgrade to Movie Maker, and Vegas stayed as a single product.

TLDR:  Movie Studio 2022 was Vegas lite,  Movie Studio 2023 is essentially Movie Maker Pro.   IMO both are good products in their own right.

I'm guessing it's no co-incidence that they're going for insolvency - the particular type of insolvency they're doing is the German equivalent of U.S. Chapter 11 - i.e. the bank/investors give them a year to reduce the number of products, streamline the organisation, and hope they're in profit in a year's time.

FWIW, I had the opposite experience... I upgraded my old "Movie Maker" version of Movie Studio a few years back, only to find I'd been sold a dumbed down Vegas.  I'm actually pretty happy it's back to Movie Maker - it might not be as powerful as Vegas, but for me it's way easier to use.

[Wookiee]

They own Soundforge as well don't they?

[Tim Smith]

I have several of those movie maker products and ACID. I made a few movies with those. Ok for basic stuff. Acid was slow to load and always buggy. I evetually removed it from my computer.

I hope they can find a buyer who will improve the products.

[user 905133]

3 hours ago, msmcleod said:

IIRC... MAGIX had a product called Movie Maker... they then rebadged it as Movie Studio.  Then they bought Vegas, and released a "lite" version and called it Movie Studio, and renamed the previous Movie Studio back to Movie Maker. 

I also had a version of some audio software Magix did that was geared towards kids.  I think it was in the Win 98 SE era and might have had the word Jam in the title.  I might still have the manual somewhere. Maybe it was called Music Maker; I'll have to look.  I used Cakewalk and I got the Magix thing because one of my kids was interested in making music and I thought Cakewalk was a bit too advanced. Anyhow, maybe Magix had Music Maker and Movie Maker as an audio-video product line.

[TW5011]

1 hour ago, Tim Smith said:

I hope they can find a buyer who will improve the products.

This may not sound like a difficult thing, but it usually is much more complicated than it seems.  Buying a company's apps and taking over the code is often an immense amount of work, to the point that it would be quicker to write it from scratch than to learn what they did and update it.  There are exceptions, of course, because some programmers use good coding technique and document what they're doing.  But in my experience, it's usually really difficult.

BTW, I've worked at a couple of companies where I wrote custom code for their apps.  One of them was a billion-dollar IT company that had bought some other companies.  I know several programming languages, but one program we inherited was in a language I'd never seen before, with lines like this:

RTVDTAARA DTAARA(*LDA (1 10)) RTNVAR(&PNAM)

and there was no documentation whatsoever.  It was not fun, nor efficient at all.  Looking up the terms, it's not too difficult to figure out what it's doing, but deciphering why they did it can be quite elusive.  And when there are tens of thousands of lines of code that isn't organized well or documented, you can spend years on it, and by then it's falling behind the competition (and probably incompatible with another Apple operating system upgrade).

I suspect many corporate leaders don't understand this, so when companies like MAGIX or InMusic buy other companies, they probably suspect they can just put people to work on it and upgrades happen, while not bothering to keep the original developers (because it's cheaper to hire entry-level programmers).  This is probably the main reason some companies become a graveyard of companies they have bought.

[craigb]

17 minutes ago, TW5011 said:

This may not sound like a difficult thing, but it usually is much more complicated than it seems.  Buying a company's apps and taking over the code is often an immense amount of work, to the point that it would be quicker to write it from scratch than to learn what they did and update it.  There are exceptions, of course, because some programmers use good coding technique and document what they're doing.  But in my experience, it's usually really difficult.

BTW, I've worked at a couple of companies where I wrote custom code for their apps.  One of them was a billion-dollar IT company that had bought some other companies.  I know several programming languages, but one program we inherited was in a language I'd never seen before, with lines like this:

RTVDTAARA DTAARA(*LDA (1 10)) RTNVAR(&PNAM)

and there was no documentation whatsoever.  It was not fun, nor efficient at all.  Looking up the terms, it's not too difficult to figure out what it's doing, but deciphering why they did it can be quite elusive.  And when there are tens of thousands of lines of code that isn't organized well or documented, you can spend years on it, and by then it's falling behind the competition (and probably incompatible with another Apple operating system upgrade).

I suspect many corporate leaders don't understand this, so when companies like MAGIX or InMusic buy other companies, they probably suspect they can just put people to work on it and upgrades happen, while not bothering to keep the original developers (because it's cheaper to hire entry-level programmers).  This is probably the main reason some companies become a graveyard of companies they have bought.

Ironically, I used to have documentation for that language!  It's RPG (Report Program Generator).  One of the IBM languages that slightly predates COBOL.  The last time I had to do anything in it was way back in 1984!

I think that line is retrieving data from a specific location and putting it into a variable (&PNAM).

[Tim Smith]

11 hours ago, TW5011 said:

This may not sound like a difficult thing, but it usually is much more complicated than it seems.  Buying a company's apps and taking over the code is often an immense amount of work, to the point that it would be quicker to write it from scratch than to learn what they did and update it.  There are exceptions, of course, because some programmers use good coding technique and document what they're doing.  But in my experience, it's usually really difficult.

BTW, I've worked at a couple of companies where I wrote custom code for their apps.  One of them was a billion-dollar IT company that had bought some other companies.  I know several programming languages, but one program we inherited was in a language I'd never seen before, with lines like this:

RTVDTAARA DTAARA(*LDA (1 10)) RTNVAR(&PNAM)

and there was no documentation whatsoever.  It was not fun, nor efficient at all.  Looking up the terms, it's not too difficult to figure out what it's doing, but deciphering why they did it can be quite elusive.  And when there are tens of thousands of lines of code that isn't organized well or documented, you can spend years on it, and by then it's falling behind the competition (and probably incompatible with another Apple operating system upgrade).

I suspect many corporate leaders don't understand this, so when companies like MAGIX or InMusic buy other companies, they probably suspect they can just put people to work on it and upgrades happen, while not bothering to keep the original developers (because it's cheaper to hire entry-level programmers).  This is probably the main reason some companies become a graveyard of companies they have bought.

Well when I typed that I partially knew it was wishful thinking. I really liked ACID. If you can get it to run it's one of the very best programs for loops. After using other DAWs I realized the GUI wasn't as intuitive. I began using it back when Sonic Foundary owned them, and later it became kind of moot if you owned Cakewalk which loads ACID loops. In fact, there may be some real bargains out there now for them. It was a novel technology, copied in concept by Ableton. REX loops were said to be better for time stretching, at least I think I remember Anderton saying that. I never noticed much difference for what I did. REX was not an Ableton product but made by the folks who make Reason.

ACID imported some movie formats, but not nearly enough. PC ones which is why they must have thought adding movie software would be profitable and truthfully, I would wager more movie maker software sold than ACID.   Movie maker was made for those making basic movies with a PC. It was fine for me and if it goes away I will be sorry to see it go. Cubase is the clear winner for a DAW that incorporates movies, or at least it and Nuendo are tops in that category. It's one of the few that imports a mac movie.  Never used Digital Performer, but it's also a clear winner in the movie and sound category so far as movie houses are concerned.

Much like Cakewalk, a lot of those programs were built on old code and took a lot to bring up to modern standards. 

As you alluded to, much more would need to be done to keep all of those programs floating. I wish them the best. Lots of people buying movie software only make a few movies a year, so there was no incentive to upgrade it every year to something else for many. 

[craigb]

3 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

Well when I typed that I partially knew it was wishful thinking. I really liked ACID.

60's child? ?

[Tim Smith]

47 minutes ago, craigb said:

60's child? ?

Born in the 60's ya. Does that mean I'm old?

[John Vere]

Just personal update to this. 
First I avoided Music Maker in my shop for DAW video and received a few angry comments and emails. So I downloaded and installed it and what a s—t show of bloatware and yep, had to remove the generic driver from Reg Edit. 
It has adds built in and just very annoying stuff. Then once you finally deal with all that the DAW itself is possible the most lame useless piece of poo out of the 14 others I’m demoing. 

Anyways the good news was while I was on the web site I saw the demo link for Vegas Pro so downloaded it and just installed it today. It is exactly like MS 17 I’ve been suffering for the last 4 years. 
But hopefully with out crashing every 5 minutes.  I’m just going to take it for a spin after lunch. 
But wow was it nice to not have to learn something new. And it opens all my MS 17 files perfectly. 
To me it’s like I was stuck with Sonar X1 for the last 4 years and just discovered Sonar 2024. At least I’m hoping. 

[craigb]

On 4/1/2024 at 11:37 AM, Tim Smith said:

Born in the 60's ya. Does that mean I'm old?

Compared to Keith Richards, nobody's old! ?