Cleaner XL
If you were surprised when discreet released Cleaner 6 some months ago and noticed that there wasn’t a Cleaner 6 for the PC, have no fears as a revamped cleaner was released for the PC shortly after. This isn’t your father’s Cleaner this is cleaner XL.
You can instantly see the differences between the two versions of this popular compression application the moment the program loads. Cleaner XL is broken into several different windows – Job, Monitor, Job Queue windows are always available, while others come and go when needed.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
The Job Window is where you import your media, decide what format you want to encode in, the settings you wish to use (bit rate, compression scheme, codec, etc), and what filters you would like to apply (watermarking, gamma, hue, and brightness settings, etc.).
To add a file, you right click in the Input region and select your file. By default the Output profile uses Windows Media format, but you can easily remove the encode files you don’t want to use and add others you do.
As always, cleaner XL supports a wide variety of output options including Windows Media 9, MPEG 4, QuickTime 6, and RealMedia 9. Discreet has made it easy for you to select from over 180 ready to use output profiles, which makes creating job quick and easy. To make it even better, these presets are created by professionals who understand what it takes to get a high quality encode. Now everyone can create encoded files that look like they were done by a pro.
The Monitor window let’s you see the results of your changes immediately. This is a huge benefit over the older versions of cleaner, which only showed a preview when you pressed Control+D and then updated the window every so often. The new Preview Monitor allows you to scrub through the clip and see how the filters and encode settings work on any frame you change. Because of the speed improvements (see below), you don’t have to wait for an update to preview, it just happens…
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| I could never get my video to display in the source window, but when the settings have been set, you can see the video in the Preview window. |
Once you have create a job, which can include more than one raw file and more than one destination format, you add it to the Job Queue where you can encode the file immediately or run them at your leisure (including stopping and pausing).
One of the best things about cleaner XL is the fact that you can have a watch folder where anyone in your company can drop a raw file into and cleaner XL will begin encoding using one of the 180 presets that you choose.
Of course the biggest benefit of cleaner XL is in the speed. XL now spends less time finding the media to encode during a batch process (see below). It also works in the background meaning that you don’t HAVE to have a dedicated system for compression. If you are a small shop, you can continually add files to your watch folder and when demands on the processor drop (say after you finish editing with Vegas for example), it will begin chugging away using more resources as necessary. This makes having cleaner XL on your system a big plus.
If you don’t want cleaner XL running in the background, you can still have everyone on the network drop their files into the watch folder and then at the end of the day start the encode. If you find there is a “need by yesterday” file in your batch list, you can move it up higher in the ranking so cleaner XL can tackle it and get it done for the client.
With the ability to encode directly for streaming, mastering for DVD and CD, there is almost no limit to what you can do with cleaner XL.
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