Cleaner XL
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Cleaner V Cleaner
So how does cleaner XL fair against Cleaner 6 on the Mac? Essentially the two applications should be nearly identical, so there shouldn’t be any quality or size differences. For this test Cleaner 6 was run on Nadia my Dual Gig G4 with 1GB of RAM. Cleaner 6 ran the batch render at 10:10 – which is to be expected on a slower machine. I’ll let the Platform Nazis fight over the particulars.[an error occurred while processing this directive]One thing I will say about the two, is that Cleaner 6 spends too much time loading up the next clip in the watch folder, while cleaner XL jumps right to the next one in the list. This wasted time represented nearly one and a half minutes of the total time that Cleaner 6 spent during the batch encode. It’s too bad I don’t have one of those new Macs to really test the XL V 6 battle. As far as ease of use goes, I still prefer the Cleaner 6 interface over cleaner XL any day. I hope that in future releases the XL version will begin to take on the old and familiar looking Cleaner 6 interface.
Are there drawbacks? Of course it wouldn’t be a complete review without them. I really miss the old Cleaner interface. It was simple and straightforward without too much guessing.
It can also be confusing as to where files are being written to unless you have read the manual or have done some “what does this button do” clicking in the application. By default your files are written to your “My Documents” folder on your computer. If you want to change that, you’ll have to edit your Cleaner Output destination file, or create your own. If you modify the Cleaner Output destination file, you will need to save it in order for the new destination to be remembered. It would be nice if when you modified the destination that it would use that folder as a new default.
My other problem, and this goes back to the interface, it isn’t very intuitive when it comes to starting your job or when you want to encode a file singly. I would very much like to see the familiar Play/Stop/Pause buttons from the older versions.
Finally, and this may have been a graphics card problem on my end, but the Monitor window never did show the source movie. The Preview window did show the results of the encode, but into order to make a direct comparison, I had to either flip between the source and destination files with the A/B switch or use the Split Screen view.
Final Thoughts
Even though cleaner has been around for a long time and has gone through six upgrades, I really consider cleaner XL to be a 1.0 version. It is totally new with major changes and improvements all of which were needed. I like the improved speed, the ability to handle batch encodes easily and am very impressed with the outputs. For the price, cleaner XL is a great deal for anyone encoding his or her media for multi-format delivery. Bottom line – I give cleaner XL a strong buy recommendation.
Cleaner XL has a Suggested Retail Price of $599 for the full version and $179 for those upgrading from cleaner 4 or cleaner 5. For more information visit discreet at www.discreet.com/cleanerxl.
For more information about Artbeats visit them here.
When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
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