Product Reviews

As a single encoding tool that supports many video and audio formats, Cleaner is a great idea in theory, but it has always been overpriced and poorly marketed. It probably doesn't help that the product has changed hands far too often, going from Terran to Media100, and now to Discreet. This regular migration meant that updates for Cleaner 5 were few and far between, and you often had to wait several months for it to support the latest streaming media codecs.

But this wasn't the only problem. Users were also frustrated by its slow encoding speeds, and if you wanted the more useful MPEG-2 encoding tools for DVD you had to shell out an extra £875 for the MPEG SuperCharger hardware accelerator.

This is where the new Cleaner XL could change things for the better. It promises high levels of control over MPEG encoding as standard, as well as much faster rendering speeds.

This much is certainly true. I found Cleaner XL's encoding speeds were actually quite tolerable for software encoding and much faster than Cleaner 5. What's more, while Cleaner 5 could support only one processor, Cleaner XL now supports dual-processor machines, so you could speed things up evenfurther if you wanted.

Like previous versions, Cleaner XL is still a batch processor, allowing you to set up a queue of files for encoding into numerous media formats. Encoding tasks are assembled in a batch list called a 'job' and then sent for encoding. Once the encoding starts, you're free to set up more jobs while rendering continues in the background. The jobs themselves can be queued, and the workflow is generally quite intuitive and user-friendly. However, each batch can now have only one source format. So if you want to encode from DV AVI, QuickTime and MPEG source files, you'll have to set up a new batch for each format.

Supported media formats for import include CD audio, MPEG video (in VCD, SVCD and DVD standards) and DV video. There's also an Export option for import profiles, allowing other multimedia files (categorised by video standard, pixel shape and interlacing) to be imported. Meanwhile, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video output comes courtesy of MainConcepts' encoder, which can also be found in Adobe Premiere, Ulead DVD Workshop and many

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other Windows-based video applications.

Other video output formats include Kinoma video for playback on Palm devices, MPEG-4, QuickTime, RealVideo, and Windows Media Player. Plus, there's support for a wide range of audio output formats, incuding MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, RealAudio and Windows Media Player, although there's no support for Ogg Vorbis .

All the Codecs are up to date, with full support for RealVideo 9 and Windows Media 9. What's more, full control is provided over bit rates, frame sizes and frame rates, as well as the number of audio and video streams packaged in a single file. Ready-made profiles for DVD-, SVCD- and VCD-compliant files are also provided, allowing variable bit-rate encoding and a choice of elementary or program-stream output.

As with previous versions, there are some great pre-processing tools on tap too. These include comprehensive controls over brightness, contrast and colour correction, black and white restore, as well as noise reduction and sharpen filters. You can also add Watermarks using image files with alpha transparency, and the audio filters have been greatly improved too, with a compressor, limiter and parametric equalisation included, as well as good control over noise reduction. Checking the effect of filters has been made easier as well, with a monitor that allows users to switch between source and encoded frames, or view them side-by-side with a split-screen effect.

This is all well and good, but for this money you expect great results, and this is where Cleaner XL's shortcomings become apparent. Streaming video is handled reasonably enough, especially considering the limited bit rates, but the results are distinctly average for DVD-compliant MPEG-2. Similarly, our test files looked okay at an average of 6Mb/sec, but dropping to around 4.5Mb/sec resulted in a softer image prone to motion artefacts and blockiness.

It's also disappointing that Cleaner doesn't provide AC-3 encoding capabilities for DVD authoring, and there's a notable lack of PAL/NTSC conversion - something that Cleaner's closest competitor, Canopus ProCoder, does extremely well.

Cleaner XL is undoubtedly a useful application, and it's also a huge improvement over version 5, but this isn't enough to justify the hefty £435 price tag. Regardless of how comprehensive its pre-processing filters are, or how many encoding formats it supports, the results aren't significantly better than what we've seen from ProCoder or other, cheaper solutions. And if you don't need an all-in-one program, you'll find there's a huge variety of affordable (sometimes free) media encoders available that can produce results just as good as Cleaner's. If Discreet can deliver a much-needed price cut, Cleaner may become an essential purchase, but until then you'd be better off shopping around.