If there’s a single must-have application for anyone working with professional video and audio on a Macintosh, it’s Terran Interactive’s Media Cleaner Pro. The company, now a subsidiary of Media 100, is the leader in video and audio compression tools. Its flagship product has adopted a new and simpler name, Cleaner, and the latest version covers greater ground, with DV capture, improved batch processing, and output to interactive streaming media. Cleaner 5 lives up to its promise to be “the camera-to-Web streaming solution.” It’s the perfect tool for both video professionals and Web content creators.
The first step in Web-based video authoring is importing video into the computer. In the past, you needed programs like Apple’s iMovie or Final Cut Pro to bring digital video into the Mac. The Cleaner 5 package now includes Digital Origin’s MotoDV, a simple application for capturing DV from FireWire-compatible DV cameras. Installing MotoDV was a simple plug-and-play process, and the application worked seamlessly with Cleaners. We simply connected our Sony DCR-TRV900 to the Mac with a FireWire cable and launched MotoDV, and we were ready for video capture.
To capture video, you just click a single button. The first time we did it, MotoDV asked us to give the file a name. After that. Cleaner 5 automatically launched and placed that clip into the batch window, ready to take instructions for compression and output.
What compression parameters you need depends on how you intend to distribute your video. Web content creators who use video on their sites want to give users as many viewing options as possible. With Cleaner 5, you can render a video in any size. The program handles all three major streaming standards — QuickTime, RealSystem, and Windows Media — as well as the MP3 format on the audio front.
Setting up the video for streaming couldn’t be simpler. The batch window gives you three options for choosing compression settings. First, control-click the settings column to bring up an extensive preset list of options. You can apply similar settings to one or more files by selecting multiple files and using the contextual menu. You can even tweak parameters for one or more of the presets. Second, the Settings Wizard, essentially an interview process, can create compression settings based on your answers. This gives you a little more control over your settings than the preset options do. Third, for nitpickers, you can go even deeper into compression parameters and twiddle with such settings as Deinterlace, Telecine, Black/White Restore, and other obscure items. Save your choices, and they will appear as a preset the next time you use the contextual menu.
The batch processor is one of the most important factors in video processing — it allows you to set all the parameters for your video files, then do other work while the computer chugs away. Cleaner 5's ability to save files to remote servers makes it ideal for streaming files. You can set each file’s destination to a local directory or to a remote streaming host server, so you don’t need a separate FTP application to upload your files. And Cleaner’s ability to process files to different streaming types allows you to save a full-size copy to a local hard drive, as well as save different sizes in streaming QuickTime, RealSystem, and Windows Media, if you dare, to a remote server. These almost endless options take Cleaners to a higher level of productivity.
The ability to encode any format of streaming media is very cool, but Cleaner 5 goes one step further with its new EventStream authoring, giving you the ability to create interactive streaming content. Imagine watching a streaming QuickTime video in your Web browser that shows, say, a person holding a product. Then you clickthat product in the QuickTime window, triggering the Web browser to open a pop-up window with the product’s description and price. Now that’s pretty snazzy. Other products do have this kind of authoring ability, but Cleaners makes the process so easy, even a beginner can do it. Simply set the time, the event, and — if appropriate — a hot spot in the video for triggering the event. Other EventStream examples include synchronized HTML to movie, Chapters, Jumping to different parts of a movie by clicking, etc. You can export this information to an XML-based file and tweak it in an XML editor — or for code-heads, any text editor.
Cleaner 5 isn’t just about Web authoring. It’s also a tool for CD and DVD authors. The program supports MPEG-1, a popular format for high-quality Internet and CD-ROM videos, and MPEG-2 compression — the DVD format. Cleaner also supports MP3 encoding of audio, with many optimization options.
Along with its host of new features, Cleaners offers some notable background improvements. It processes files fester than previous versions. It includes dual-processor support for Increased processing speed. It also produces higher-quality video using an improved adaptive noise-reduction filter, and better audio with an improved dynamic-range audio filter. The XML-based settings allow sharing of files between Mac and Windows platforms.
Along with this powerful tool comes a useful manual. The well-laid-out, easy-to- read contents offer in-depth information about video and formats. For instance, one chapter discusses tips on shooting video for faster streaming, another detailed section covers format architecture. Add to this a 22-page glossary and a comprehensive index, and you have a great package.
Overall, the extensive tools and new features in version 5 make this already killer product worthy of another Freakin' Awesome!
Tokuda, Andrew. (February 2001). Cleaner 5. MacAddict. (pg. 46-47).
Terran Interactive
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2020-09-13 / 
a10b9324d30e2d89debeb6ec38d61166d8af79ac / 
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Cleaner_5.iso_.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
