Performance
improvements
In general, Cleaner 5 receives a number of performance enhancements.
Terran says the whole video engine has been reworked for better
speed and output. It also gains Velocity support on the Power
Mac G4. Terran has said that although the initial release of Cleaner
5 would not include coding specifically for dual-processor G4s,
it did pick up some incidental speed gains anyway. At this point
I can't give you any quantitative results of tests between Media
Cleaner Pro 4 and Cleaner 5 because I don't have any. Nor have
I tested it on a dual-processor Mac. (We'll have to see how good
Santa Claus thinks I've been this year before I can start providing
those kinds of tests.)
Cleaner
5 also lifts the 2 GB barrier on movie files, allowing you to
encode files of any size, provided you have enough disk space.
Format
support
Cleaner 5 reads and writes more formats than before. In terms
of video, it can read DV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, QuickTime and AVI, and
it can write DV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, QuickTime, RealSystem 8 and Windows
Media.
In
terms of audio, it can read AIFF/AIFC, AU, Audio CD (Mac only!),
DV, MP3, QuickTime, Sound Designer II and WAV. (Note that it can
pull an audio file straight off an audio CD on the Mac. The file
is then saved in a folder on you hard drive for later processing,
if desired.) It can save audio in AIFF, DV, MP3, QuickTime, RealSystem
8, System 7 Sound, Wave and Windows Media formats.
Cleaner
5's output panel showing supported formats.
It
can also read animated GIFs, Flash files, FLC/FLI, PICS and series
of still images and output to FLC and image sequences. Finally,
it can read just about any still image format (but not CMYK images)
and output to BMP, JPEG/JFIF, PICT, PNG and QTIF (QuickTime Image
File). What's more, Cleaner 5 lets you convert between certain
formats without loss or recompression, such as QuickTime to AVI.
What
else is new?
I can't
go into detail about every new feature found in Cleaner 5. So
here's the quick and dirty on the rest of the goodies you'll find
in the new version.
- Improvements
on its existing A/V filters like adaptive noise reduction and
new processing options, such as adaptive deinterlace, temporal
noise reduction and others.
- Improvements
in its handling of AVI files, according to Terran. (I never
mess around with anything but QuickTime, including for this
review, because nothing matches QuickTime's quality, compatibility
or features.)
- Inverse
Telecine (3:2 Pulldown), which works regardless of editing and
effects that are added after the transfer and requires no user
intervention.
- You can
now override base settings with a settings modifier applied
in the Project window. This allows you to assign a single base
setting to a range of files and then modify aspects unique to
each source, such as color correction and filtering, without
having to create multiple new settings.
- You can
now specify in/out times in the Advanced Settings window.
- Finally,
you can now skip items in your batch without removing them completely
from your batch list.
The questions
Some of our users out there will have two very good questions
about Cleaner 5: Does it work with the hardware you got with your
Media Cleaner Power Suite, and is there a "lite" version
available? As you might know, the Media Cleaner Power Suite was
a high-end version of Media Cleaner Pro 4 that shipped with, among
other things, an Ultra BlueICE board to accelerate compression.
Since the time of the Power Suite's release, Media
100, the parent company of Terran Interactive, purchased the technology
behind the ICE, but they have yet to offer a hardware solution
for Cleaner 5 and have not given any indication of their future
plans. So, no, Cleaner 5 will not work with your Power Suite hardware.
As for a "lite"
version, one is not available yet, but you can still download
Media Cleaner EZ 4 for free for the Macintosh from http://www.icanstream.com/downloads/register-unplugmac1.asp.
(It also comes with a free version of EditDV.) No word yet on
when an EZ version of Cleaner 5 will be available. But keep in
mind that Media Cleaner EZ 4 was not free when it was first released
and that, while it offers the same great compression as Media
Cleaner Pro, it didn't have all the same features.
You might
also be wondering whether any options are available for Cleaner
5. Yup. There's MPEG Charger and MPEG SuperCharger. MPEG Charger
adds variable bit rate encoding to Cleaner 5, while SuperCharger
adds VBR and hardware acceleration via a PCI card. I haven't gotten
a hold of these two yet, but information is available on Terran's
Web site.
You can also
purchase the Cleaner 5 Compression Suite, which includes Cleaner
5, Sorenson Video Developer Edition and QDesign Music Codec Professional
Edition. Codecs can also be purchased separately. (The Compression
Suite runs $1,399.)
The bottom
line
Assuming you've never touched any version of Media Cleaner, do
yourself a favor and first download the free version from the
link above. Use the Settings Wizard to play around with some options,
and watch the results. You will be amazed with the final file
size and quality. Now try to quantify your joy as a number between
one and 10. Multiply that number by 1,000, and that's the dollar
value of the experience you can expect from Cleaner 5. If the
number came out to be higher than $599 (the retail price of Cleaner
5), you are obligated by law to purchase it.
For those
of you who do use Media Cleaner Pro, you're probably already sold
anyway. The upgrade price is $179 and well worth it. If you happened
to have purchased Media Cleaner Pro (including the Compression
Suite) after Sept. 10, you can upgrade for $49, but you have to
upgrade before Dec. 1 to get this deal, and that's just a little
more than a week away. Get yourself an early Christmas present.
Our
recommendation: strong buy.
For more information,
visit http://www.terran.com.
