terran interactive Media Cleaner Pro 4.0 - Software Review - Evaluation

Emedia Professional, Dec, 1999 by Jeff Sauer

Media Cleaner now includes a handful of formally separate utilities, like lossless conversations between QuickTime and AVI files and flattening QuickTime movies for cross-platform playback. Media Cleaner supports RealVideo options, like PerfectPlay and SureStream, and the ASX files of Windows Media, as well as QuickTime's Movie Alternates.

codec central

Terran uses Apple's QuickTime media architecture as the foundation for Media Cleaner. (The long wait for a Windows version was heavily tied to full Windows support in QuickTime.) Therefore, any codec or file format supported by QuickTime is available in Cleaner, including Sorenson's Video Codec, Indeo 3.2, DV, QDesign's audio codec, and several others. Since QuickTime can open AVI files, importing Windows media assets is not a problem.

Media Cleaner can also create ASF files using its native codecs, MPEG-4 and MP3 audio, though you'll need the Windows Media Player to view the results. Similarly, Media Cleaner supports RealNetworks' streaming media codecs and can output RealVideo and RealAudio files, but requires Real's player in order to play your output.

Through a bundle with Heuris, Inc., Media Cleaner can now output MPEG-1 streams. If you upgrade to Heuris' MPEG Power Professional, (http://www.heuris.com), you'll also gain MPEG-2 output capabilities.

In addition to simply supporting industry codecs, Terran has made it a priority to provide educational information on the various codecs. In a separate Web site from their own homepage (http://www.terran.com), Terran's codec-specific site (http://www.codeccentral.com) shows examples of video clips compressed in different codecs and with different settings. The site also provides written information about compression options. Media Cleaner's very thorough and clearly written manual also gives users definitions and explanations of many of the issues faced in creating low data and streaming media content.

the process

Media Cleaner's main application interface is little more than a blank slate--the Process Window--into which you drag (or right mouse--"Add to Batch" or use the File menu) any number of clips (1-2000) to be processed. Each group of clips can be saved as a separate project or "Batch," though unfortunately, you cannot have more than one Batch open at a time. Nor can you open multiple versions of the application.

Clips in the Process Window are shown in either icon or list view, each with clips name, settings if assigned, and processing status. You can alphanumerically sort a batch by any of those or by a manually set priority code. Single-clicking on a column header sorts, while double-clicking reverses the order. Unfortunately, the potentially valuable priority sort had a bug and did not function properly: particularly annoying because once you've dropped files into the Process Window, you can't reorder them via simple drag and drop.

While a batch can have just one clip, there is, awkwardly, no way to highlight and process one clip of a group if your batch has multiple clips. You can manually suspend and resume compression at any time, so perhaps Media Cleaner is doing you a favor by continuing to process until you're ready to take some manual action. However, you can't begin compressing a batch until you've assigned settings for all clips in the batch.