Cleaner XL

Cleaner XL is actually version 6 (for the PC) of Discreet’s media cleaner, which has long been the industry standard in recompressing video for different formats. It enables you to take DV footage and spit it out as low-bandwidth Internet video, or to take DVD scenes and convert them into QuickTime format for use on CD-ROM. However, because the look and feel of the product has changed totally, and because the Mac has already seen a version 6, Discreet has this time opted to abandon version numbers and start from scratch.

What this highlights is that cleaner XL is really not the same product as cleaner 6 for the Mac. XL looks a lot more business-like, with the emphasis on undertaking multiple jobs and batch-processing. You don’t automatically see your footage playing anymore, unless you open up the monitor window; instead, you set up input and output parameters, and list your clips in a browser window.

Tools for fine-tuning the compression of your work are still important, although the emphasis has shifted even more towards presets for everything you might need. There are, in fact, 183 output profiles, enabling you to choose any format or compression you might need as soon as you install the package. You can also create your own, and save them to be used again and again.

Vanishing Act
The big focus of cleaner XL is on getting the product and its processes as far into the background as possible. Its aim is to vanish almost entirely; to just get on with its work without bothering the user.

To this end, re-compression now works entirely in the background, and you can play around with settings, or schedule new compression jobs while it’s working. To take this even further, you can set up a ‘watch folder’. This is simply a folder on your hard drive which cleaner will keep an eye on. When it sees that you’ve placed a video file into that folder, it will automatically run whatever processes you’ve set up, and even send the rendered results to a remote FTP site.

Say you’re running a news Website and a story comes in. You can cut it together in DV format on your favourite video editor, and save it out to the watch folder. cleaner then automatically detects it, re-compresses it in as many different Web-video formats as you need, and uploads it to your live Website. And it does it all automatically.

Chances are, all that most users will ever do is pick out the presets and go with them. There are quick and easy setups for converting to all the important video formats, as well as the newest ones (Windows Media 9, MPEG 4, QuickTime 6, AAC audio and so on). There are also a few more unusual formats, notably Kinoma for palmtops. These presets have all been carefully put together, and will give great results for most footage.

Occasionally, you’ll have clips that would benefit from some fine-tuning of the presets – typically, video shot in unusual lighting conditions, or where shots with very high or very low action content need to be highly compressed. This fine-tuning can be done in as much detail as you like. All the controls are provided, and you can easily experiment, watching the results in the preview window.

You can also add both audio and video filters to your work, and do basic trimming. There are Gamma tools as well as filters for blurring, colour balance and automatic fading. Audio filters notably include a parametric equalizer for pin-point control over the tonal qualities of your sound, and noise filters for reducing background hum and other interference.

Filtering and effects of this kind are usually best done within your video-editing package, but the advantage in cleaner XL is that you can add them separately to different output options. This is useful, because you may want to process an MPEG version of your footage straight, but then increase the contrast in the low bandwidth RealMedia version, or boost the sound in a 56kbs Windows Media file.

Preview Options
With all these options on compression and filters, you’ll want to know how your footage is going to come out before you commit to it. cleaner XL provides several preview options. Bringing up the monitor, you can switch between a view of the unprocessed and processed footage. You can also use the split-screen option to compare your image before and after compression. If motion is more important than straight image quality, then you can render a short section of footage to see how the moving shot looks.

Performance in your preview depends on the footage being processed. The key is not necessarily the resolution of the footage – although that plays a part – it’s also the work the package has to do in decompressing and recompressing it before it can start work, and the type of information stored in the video file to begin with.

Once you’ve picked your input and output formats, you’ll want to render the scene. All rendering work is now done in the background, so you can carry on working while the app creates and distributes your video. However, it’s also faster – Discreet has specifically tuned the package to take full advantage of multi-processor machines.

Along with the change in the way cleaner handles video, the XL version also introduces new formats aimed at mobile computing, preparing for the expected revolution that will put video onto every mobile phone and palmtop. It’s not quite clear how the public will react to this new technology yet, but at least cleaner XL offers all the necessary formats (MPEG 4, principally). So if you want to be ready to set up a company selling football match highlights or video junk-mail to mobile phone users, then cleaner XL provides everything you’ll need.

Tricky Tasks
cleaner has a difficult job. At one end of the spectrum, it has to be able to produce tightly compressed files for the 56kbs Internet user; at the other, it’s got to be able to work with the modern High Definition formats like Windows Media 9, providing footage at higher than DV quality. The package also seems to have set itself the task of becoming a near-live Internet transmission system, managing and recompressing video to feed in to Websites automatically as soon as you’ve got it ready to go. Multi-tasking, it seems, is what the new cleaner XL is all about…