Cleaner 5

[dizzynoodle]

anyone use Cleaner 5 ? I have been using the older [Media Cleaner Pro - version 4] which was exellent. I would alway render uncompressed from After Effects and then runi i thru MCP4 for the various compressed versions i needed.

Anyone try V5. How is the capture module. I understand it uses MotoDV as a built-in capture module !? How's that perform. How's the Mpeg1/2 output quality?

[LC1104]

I used Cleaner 5 all summer. at first i hated it because it was so buggy. I then downloaded the patch for Cleaner and also the latest DirectX 8.0A. That helped the crashes. But I still had random bugs. One bug that was annoying was that when running long batches of say 20 output files, sometimes random files would generate unusally gigantic sizes. For example, out of a batch of 20, one of my 56K cilps came out to be 10MB. When I ran the batch again, it came out correctly at .5MB. I have contacted Terran about this and they are looking into it.

Quality wise, I have to say that I was impressed with Cleaner. Its filters do a great job of cleaning up the picture. And the options are simple yet powerful. One thing though is that Cleaner is horribly slow. It can take 2-3 times longer than other programs to render using the same codec.

As for MPEG quality, I didn't test that too much, but the clips that I did encode were very good. I was actually using the MPEGCharger for Cleaner. I think that adds more options such as VBR.

Another option you might want to consider is a program called Anystream. www.anystream.com. Although this is more of an enterprise solution (>$1000), they have a workgroup version. Last time I checked, they had a demo available for download that has all the capabilities other than deck control and capture. As long as you provide source files, this does an awesome job. One major point that is impressive about this program is that if you have dual processors, it will encode two streams at once from you batch. I would have to say that this is one of the fastest encoders I have seen. Anystream only has WMV, Real, QT(1 pass CBR Sorenson 2), MPEG 1, and MPEG 2. I definetly recomend that you take a look at this program.

I would wait on Cleaner 5 until their next patch comes out (they said "end of summer," but who knows what that means), 5.1. This will include WMV 8, Real 8.5 and Sorenson 3 encoding. I'm psyched about that. Hope this helps.

Jason

[dizzynoodle]

Thanx man for all the info... i do agree about the speed issue... same problem with MCP4... damn only if it was faster ! I'll try the product you recommended... did you say the demo does all but capture !? Man that is awesome ! I'll check it out right now !