Cleaner 5
The Ultimate Video Compression Tool
By Peter Bohush
Ay carumba, that's a lot of settings!
(April 2001) -- Let's separate the hype from the reality. Cleaner 5 from Terran
Interactive bills itself as a complete camera-to-web solution that makes it
easy to put video and audio on your site. That's a hype-filled claim if I ever
heard one. The only problem with that claim is that it probably doesn't go far
enough to state just how powerful and indispensable Cleaner 5 is as a tool for
compressing multimedia files.
Now the part that says makes it easy to put video and audio on your site
could be challenged, especially when you're faced with the nearly limitless
number of settings you could use to compress your video and audio into the
Mini-Me size QuickTime, RealSystem and Windows Media files necessary for web
streaming. Easy? Well yes, compared to moving a piano. Complicated? Yep.
Of course, if you tried to take one of your VHS tapes and compress it
yourself by jumping on it, squashing it and scrubbing out duplicate data with a
Brillo pad, you'd end up with what people in San Francisco call performance art
and those in Worcester call garbage. But you probably wouldn't call that easy to
do and you definitely wouldn't have good results when you loaded it up to your
website.
Why Compression?
For those of you new to posting video to the web, you need to understand that
a full-screen video file with sound will be between 4 to 50 Megabytes in size
PER SECOND, depending on the quality of your source file. A 1.5-minute clip at
40 Mb/sec., which is decent quality for digital video editing, will result in a
3.6 Gigabyte file. That's way too big to post on most websites, which often
restrict your storage. And too big to download, too.
A standard 56k (kilobits/second) modem will take around seven minutes to
download one Megabyte of data, assuming its downloading at 50 percent
throughput, which is fairly generous over the internet. Even a T1 line running
at 100 percent (1.5 megabits/second, which they never do), would take about six
seconds per one Megabyte of data, or about one-third of a second of video. The
3.6 Gigabyte file (1.5 minutes of video) would take about 5 hours to download
over a T1 line, 12 hours over a cable modem, and 142 hours over a 56k modem
(assuming 100 percent speed.)
Enter the Cleaner
Formerly known as Media Cleaner Pro, the new Cleaner 5 includes enhancements
that allow you to capture video right from a camera or deck into Cleaner 5,
compress the video into web, CD-ROM and other formats in single or batch jobs,
encode your files with interactive links and navigation, and finally publish the
files into one or several website folders.
For the $600 price ($179 upgrade), you also get a whole gaggle of workflow
settings and modifiers, useful for those who would be using Cleaner 5 at a
heavy-streaming company.
Cleaner 5 offers a useful wizard process to help you determine good settings
for your needs. There are also numerous presets that work quite well, and each
can be tweaked in a multitude of ways and saved as your own favorite settings.
What does Cleaner 5 do? Simply, it will take a video, audio or image file and
compress its file size to a manageable size for your needs, such as a web
video. For example, I took a 1 min. 43 sec. file that was 370 Mb in size
at 640 X 480 pixels (full size.) That's too big to post on the web, so I ran it
through Cleaner 5 to give me a more manageable file. The result was a smaller
(160 X 120 pixels) image and a file size reduced to just 1.8 Mb. Awesome!
Timing is Everything
It will take time to compress your files. I tried several different file
sizes and settings, and found Cleaner 5 takes anywhere from three to eight
minutes to compress each minute of source footage. (Compressing is not actually
changing your original files; Cleaner 5 is rendering and saving whole new
files.)
A really nice feature of Cleaner 5 is the ability to set in and out points of
your source footage, so you don't have to render out the whole thing. I used
this to run short tests of my compression settings so I didn't have to wait for
the whole thing to render in order to find out if my settings were good.
There are still a couple of quirks in Cleaner 5, some of which have carried
over from previous versions. The windows often appear out of range of the
computer screen, with no way to move or resize them. If your system goes to
sleep while compressing a file, you'll have to start all over.
Camera to Web
Terran Interactive is owned by Media 100, which also owns Digital Origin
(formerly Radius), makers of EditDV and MotoDV, the editing and capturing
applications. Cleaner 5 is now bundled with MotoDV to handle the capturing of
video from your deck onto your hard drive. MotoDV is a solid capture program
that's largely intuitive and straightforward to use. Adding the hooks into
Cleaner 5 to start MotoDV is a nice feature, if probably not a significant
programming achievement. Users who already own MotoDV wont benefit tremendously
from Cleaner 5s support of it; but it wont hurt, either.
Crash warning: Apple systems with Final Cut Pro cannot install MotoDV unless
first disabling the Final Cut Pro extensions and creating a separate extensions
profile for MotoDV. This means you'll have to change your extensions profile and
restart each time you want to switch between MotoDV and Final Cut Pro. There are
also reported conflicts with Premiere and iMovie. Fortunately, Cleaner 5 doesn't
automatically install MotoDV, so you wont create any conflicts out of the box if
you're a Final Cut Pro user.
Summary
The complexity of Cleaner 5s myriad of settings meant trying several settings
to get one that looked and sounded good for my test file while still coming in
at under 2 Mb. The built-in wizard settings didn't give me exactly what I wanted
for this project, but they are a good starting point, and have been suitable for
me in the past. I found the RealSystem wizard settings to be particularly good,
while the QuickTime settings took a lot of tweaking to get really good
compression while maintaining image and sound quality.
And despite a manual that's well-written, there's often not enough
information to truly understand all of the settings and their relationships to
each other. This is a program you cannot master with a one-day class, and
certainly not by simply referring to the manual as you go through trials and
errors. If you want to dedicate the time and effort to become really qualified
and comfortable in Cleaner 5, it could be worth it as a profession.
For the casual user, Cleaner 5 might be overkill for your needs. Try the
Cleaner 4 EZ, a QuickTime-only lite version that retails for $99 and is included
free in products such as Final Cut Pro.
For the power user, there's no better compression utility on the market than
Cleaner 5. You may want it to be simpler at times, but you'll never find
yourself wishing it did more because it does it all.
-30-
A master of compression, Peter Bohush regularly compresses his clothes
when he does laundry, and once compressed his thumb under a ball peen hammer.
His uncompressed website is www.WriterDirector.com.
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