terran interactive Media Cleaner Pro 4.0 - Software Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, Dec, 1999 by Jeff Sauer

terran Interactive introduced Media Cleaner Pro (nee Movie Cleaner) some four years ago without much fanfare or a splashy ad campaign. Moreover, it was a tool that, on the surface, did a job that could already be done from within a video editor like Adobe's Premiere. Yet today, Media Cleaner has become a staple of any serious digital media production studio. It got there by doing a specific function, compressing video for digital distribution, very well.

Originally a multimedia production company itself, Terran Interactive first developed Media Cleaner as an internal tool to improve their own workflow, automating repeated operations, and creating tools to increase image quality. Not surprisingly, since they were solving the same daily hassles faced by other content developers, business acquaintances quickly became interested in their tools--so much so that Terran switched their business.

Initially a Macintosh-only product, Media Cleaner Pro 4.0 ($499) is the first version available for Windows, supporting 95/98 and NT. With the exceptions of its use of Windows conventions and a few first-version bugs, Cleaner 4.0 doesn't lose much in the translation from the Mac. There are a few minor interface annoyances, but if you regularly compress video for digital distribution, Media Cleaner offers two distinct advantages that make it well worth the price of admission: better quality and greater efficiency.

so what does cleaner clean?

Media Cleaner is not a video editor; in fact, Terran has planned, but thus far avoided, adding a potentially valuable timeline interface lest it confuse the market. Nor is it a tool for "creating" content. Rather, Media Cleaner advances the unglamorous art of compressing digital media files for low and mid-level data rate distribution, like CD-ROM and the Web.

Media Cleaner's primary benefit is increased image quality. Squeezing full-motion video down to less than one percent of its original data rate is often accomplished by brute force. But Media Cleaner offers a collection of noise reduction and blur filters, as well as other tools, that assist in making the most out of the limited bits available.

For example, since noise is the most difficult aspect of video to compress, noise filters eliminate random pixels typical of signal noise, thus saving more data bits for the actual picture. Blurring filters, similarly, massage hard-to-compress sharp edges, removing the inevitable artifacts of sharp lines. While softening an image may sound counter-intuitive, the overall effect once the image is heavily compressed is usually a great improvement. Premiere also has Gaussian Blur and Median filters in its export module, but Media Cleaner usually does a better and faster job on a greater range of material. This is particularly noticeable when working with more difficult or busy scene content with fine lines or text.

Cropping video allows you to remove unwanted noisy or black edges that would otherwise just eat bits. Terran provides a wonderful click-and-drag selector for cropping, though you can also do it by numbers or pixel ratios. Other built-in image enhancement tools include de-interlace, field dominance adjustment, unsharp mask, static mask, and scaling. You can even add a watermark.

what does cleaner speed?

Media Cleaner's second main benefit to busy content producers is its automation of regularly used techniques. Most importantly, Media Cleaner's main work area is built around batch processing of several clips. You can compress several clips in a batch or the same clip several different ways to test settings. Equally valuable when deadlines are looming, during processing, Media Cleaner shows a preview window with a helpful Before/After slider bar. With the "Before" on the left and "After" on the right, you can see what effect your compression parameters are having on the video. Not only is this a terrific teaching tool, it's a time-saver if you see a problem and need to abort compression.

Without the overhead of an entire video editing application, Media Cleaner can be up to 35-40 percent faster than exporting from an editing interface. That advantage may be negated if you first must export your clips from an editor as uncompressed video or using a capture card's hardware codec, then open them in Media Cleaner. To avoid this, Terran has built a plug-in for Premiere that allows you to export an unrendered project directly to Media Cleaner. Media 100 users can similarly quickly export "By Reference" (a list of file pointer rather than a render), though Avid users will need a soon-to-be-available $199 OMF export module to avoid a QuickTime export.

Terran also automates the nitty-gritty task of fade up/down from black, white, gray, or some other color at the beginning and end of clips. You can even trim clips (create new in and out points). While both functions can certainly be done within an editing application, if you're trying to create a consistent look for a collection of clips for a single Web site, it can be a real time-saver.