Processing
Media Files with Discreet cleaner XL
(Discreet cleaner XL, Canopus ProCoder)
by Douglas Dixon, Manifest Technology, www.manifest-tech.com
Media
Cleaner
Cleaner XL -
Cleaner
Interface
Using
cleaner XL - Setting
Up Processing - Running
Jobs
Getting
Automated
References
Change is
good, perhaps, but change is also difficult.
Change can out knock us out of our comfort
zone, even when a friend has a dramatic
makeover, or when a company plans a major
reorganization. But you also have to admire
companies that are willing to change, and
take the risk of challenging their customers
by reinventing familiar products, whether
the results follow the example of the New
Coke, or the New Beetle.
Discreet
has challenged us in this way with its new
release of cleaner XL for Windows, by
dramatically changing this popular
cross-platform tool for media processing and
encoding. With the release of cleaner 6 for
Mac OS X in late 2002, Discreet moved away
from maintaining parallel Mac and Windows
versions in order to provide deeper support
for the specific features of each platform.
Cleaner XL is the culmination of this work,
with a total redesign of both the interface,
and the processing workflow that it
supports.
Tools like
Discreet cleaner and Canopus ProCoder are
designed to help automate the final step in
video production, taking video files and
processing, enhancing, converting, and
compressing them into the desired
destination formats. These tools allow you
to package up commonly-used conversions and
compression settings, and then automatically
batch-process groups of files to a wide
variety formats. You even can set up shared
folders and simply drop in edited videos,
and have them processed and delivered to
pre-defined destinations in various file,
compression, and streaming formats.
Media
Cleaner was originally developed by
Terran Interactive as a tool to automate the
process of enhancing ("cleaning")
media files and converting them multiple
formats. Cleaner 5 (dropping the
"Media" prefix), released in late
2000, was a popular cross-platform tool for
converting video to web streaming formats,
and also offered upgrades for MPEG encoding,
including hardware assists. Meanwhile,
Terran was absorbed into Media 100, and the
Cleaner line was then acquired by Discreet
in August 2001.
Discreet
enhanced the cleaner product (now named with
their lowercase style) to version 5.1 in
late 2001 and early 2002, adding support for
Windows XP and Mac OS X. But then Discreet
made a strategic decision to decouple the
development of the two versions of the
product. Instead of trying to maintain a
common interface across both platforms,
cleaner could then be adapted to take
advantage of the full capabilities of each
platform, and also provide deeper support
for platform-specific features in the
available encoders and formats.
The first
evidence of this change was the release of cleaner
6 for Mac OS X in October 2002 ($599 SRP),
a Mac-only product with no accompanying
Windows version. Cleaner 6 supports
QuickTime, RealMedia, and Windows Media
formats, Kinoma video format for handheld
PDAs, and MPEG-4 and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)
audio through QuickTime 6.
Which
brings us to cleaner XL, the new and
substantially different Windows version
released in March 2003 ($599 list, www.discreet.com/products/cleaner).
Cleaner XL supports more formats, runs
faster, has more quality enhancement
features, and then packages this new
functionality in a dramatically changed user
interface.
to get cleaner
XL from B&H for only $499.5 - get
cleaner upgrade for just $179
In terms of
functionality, cleaner XL supports 60 media
formats, including the new Apple QuickTime
6, including MPEG-4 video and AAC audio;
RealNetworks RealSystem 9, including
multi-channel audio; Microsoft Windows Media
9, including high-definition and
multi-channel audio; and Kinoma for PalmOS
PDAs.
In terms of
performance, cleaner XL is optimized for
multiple processors and the new Intel
Hyper-Threading architecture. Discreet
benchmarks it as 100 to 250 percent faster
than cleaner 5.1.2 on the same hardware.
For better
quality results, cleaner XL processes video
in its native color space, and provides more
than 50 video and audio preprocessing
options and filters to enhance, sweeten,
repair, and noise reduce your media.
All of this
would have made a fine incremental upgrade,
but Discreet went further to re-architect
its software using the Windows .NET
architecture, and then built an interface
that focused on providing great flexibility
for saving and loading sets of processing
settings. With cleaner XL, you don't just
save a job or a compression format, you also
can save custom input formats, encoding
parameters, audio and video filters, and
output formats. With this design, Discreet
has deliberately accepted the additional
interface complexity that comes with this
flexibility, providing more power for
serious users at the cost of making casual
use more difficult.
The problem
with designing an interface for this kind of
media processing tool is that there are just
so many parameters that need to be viewed
and accessed. The common interface
conventions for dealing with this are tabs
or palettes to access different types of
settings, and hierarchical lists (like
Windows Explorer) to navigate within groups
of options. Previous generations of Cleaner
used tabs to view different types of
settings (Image, Audio, Encode, Output), and
a hierarchical list to explore preset
compression options (MPEG, QuickTime, Real
System, Windows Media). The advantage of
this approach is that it is easy to view the
big picture of current settings and
available options, before drilling down into
specific details.
Canopus
ProCoder, released May 2002 ($699 list, www.canopuscorp.com)
uses a similar approach to organize the
processing steps in a wizard-like
progression. In ProCoder, you select Source
files, define Target formats, and then
Convert. The Target page uses a tabbed
approach to view a summary of the settings
for each selected output format, and
provides an Advanced tab to drill down into
a hierarchical list of formats and their
corresponding detailed settings. This
approach is very easy to quickly understand
and use: just select your input files,
choose the desired output presets, and then
run the conversion. As you get more
experienced, the interface also provides
additional options to drill down into the
advanced features and define your own
presets.
With
cleaner XL, Discreet has moved in a
dramatically different direction. Instead of
providing a single interface to view and
define your project settings, cleaner XL
uses a myriad of separate dialogs to edit
specific bundles of settings. The advantage
of this approach is that each collection of
settings can be individually defined, saved,
and later reloaded to use again. The
disadvantage is that the interface does not
provide a quick way to explore or review the
different settings, or to see high-level
summary of the various current settings.
In
addition, the cleaner XL interface is
relatively sparse. There are no action
buttons such as Add or Delete for files or
settings. Instead, you must use the main
menus to select an action, or the
right-click pop-up menus to choose an
operation in the selected context. You then
click the settings buttons to display the
associated settings editor, or click the
drop-down button menus to load a predefined
option.
Cleaner XL
organizes its interface around the concept
of a job, or an operation to be applied to a
set of files. You define a job in the Job
Window by loading source media files,
setting processing options, and defining
output formats. You then can save the job,
or submit it to the queue of pending jobs.
Cleaner provides a separate Job Queue
window to view and manage your jobs, which
means you can continue working and defining
new jobs as it is running other jobs in the
queue.
The Job
Window contains two major sections, the Sources
to be processed, and the Processing
actions to perform on them. Each has lists
of files or formats to be used in this job,
and buttons to define the options for
processing to be applied to them.
You build
the list of source files by simply dropping
them into the Sources area of the window.
The Sources area also includes the Input
Profile settings button. This defines
the aspect ratio and interlacing format of
the input files, with presets for DV and
DVD, NTSC and PAL, 4x3 and 6x9. Or use the
Input Profile Editor to define a custom
frame format and pixel aspect ratio. Only
one Input Profile can be defined per job, so
all input files must share the same basic
frame format.
You can
right-click to view and edit the Source
Properties, including Audio, Video, and
Size. Or use the separate Monitor
window to preview, trim, and crop each
individual source file. Instead of scaling
the video to fit the window size, the
Monitor window offers three Size options:
Full, Half, Quarter screen. As found in
video editors, the Monitor window includes
play controls to play back source files, and
trim controls to set In and Out points
within the clip. You also can set a crop
region by dragging a rectangle over the
frame, or right-click to display the Source
Crop Editor to set numeric crop values and
the crop aspect ratio.
The Sources
area provides two more tools for dealing
with special input formats. Use the Multifile
Source editor to associate separate
video and audio files (i.e., after MPEG
compression), and multi-channel audio (with
each channel defined in an individual file).
Use the Metadata Editor to define
auxiliary information about each source
file, such as Title, Description, Copyright,
and Author, including format-specific
metadata for the various streaming output
formats.
The Processing
area then defines all the processing options
to be applied to each source file. The first
two settings, Deinterlace and Crop, are
applied as preprocessing to all sources in
the job and all output profiles.
The Deinterlace
Method setting can clean up interlaced
television video when converting to a
progressive format (especially for streaming
video for computer display). The visible
differences between adjacent lines from
different frames can be removed in different
ways: Blend the lines (good for fast motion
blur), Eliminate one set of alternating
lines (to preserve sharpness), Automatic
frame conversion when changing frame rate,
or Adaptive deinterlace depending on the
motion in the scene (slower).
The Job
Crop settings apply to all sources, but
can be overridden by a specific Source Crop
setting in the Monitor window. You also can
set the Remove Letterbox option to
automatically remove the black unused areas
in the top and bottom of a letterboxed
video, including specifying the Tightness of
the crop around the edge.
Next, you
specify the list of formats, or Output
Profiles that each source file is to be
converted into, and the list of one or more
Destinations to which each Output Profile is
to be delivered.
Cleaner XL
includes over 180 pre-defined output
profiles. Each Output Profile defines one
Encoder Setting (compression format), an
associated video and audio Filter Setting
(cleanup and enhancements), and a set of one
or more Destinations.
The
supplied Output Profiles include streaming
formats (MPEG-4, QuickTime, Real, Windows
Media) for Film, NTSC, and PAL; 4x3 and 16x9
aspect ratios; download and streaming; at
dial-up to wideband rates. It also includes
MPEG-1 and -2 for CD, Web, Kiosk, VCD, and
DVD delivery; Handheld (Kioma); and
Audio-only (MP3 and streaming). You can
create your own Output Profiles by
duplicating and editing an existing format
and then saving it with a new name.
To edit an
Output Profile, you use the Encoder Setting
and Filter Setting buttons to display the
associated editors. These settings also can
be saved and reloaded, independently of the
Output Profiles that may use them.
Use the Encoder
Setting Editor to define the base
encoding format (i.e., AVI, MPEG, streaming,
audio), the video and audio codecs and
formats, and format-specific encoding
parameters. You also can rename the output
files to help identify them using File
Extensions with a format-specific Prefix and
Suffix.
Use the Filter
Setting Editor to set a chain of one or
more filters to apply to the input video and
audio before it is compressed. The available
filters are listed as a chain of consecutive
processing steps. The Video filters include
Color adjustments, Noise Reduce, Blur and
Sharpen, Fades, and Watermarks. The Audio
filters include Noise Reduction, Volume,
Normalize, Parametric EQ (6 channel), and
Fades.
To apply
filters, just check the desired filters to
apply them, and then edit the associated
parameter values. Again, cleaner XL provides
an array of pre-defined presets for each
filter, and you can load, edit, and save
your own individual presets as well.
Finally,
click each Output Profile to view and edit
the list of Destinations. The default
destination is Cleaner Output, which is set
under the View / Options menu. Not
surprisingly, Cleaner also offers a
Destination Editor to define and save other
destinations. The destination can be a local
or networked directory Path, and a
sub-directory can be automatically created
for them based on the job name. The
destination also can be a FTP site, for
example to publish files to a Web server.
You also can control the action taken if the
output file already exists: overwrite, skip,
or automatically serialize by adding a
numeric suffix.
Now that
you have defined all the job options, and
loaded and saved all the various bundles of
useful settings, you can start the job
running. Or, you can use the Monitor window
to preview the results of the job. Click the
small right arrow on the side of the Monitor
window to open the Preview pane. You
then can use the play controls in the left
Source pane to move through the clip, and
also view the corresponding output frame. To
help look at the results of the processing
and filtering, you use A/B Flip to alternate
between the before and after frames, or
Split Screen to see the difference within a
frame, or select Output to render a preview
and play through a short section of the
clip.
Now, it's
time to actually run the job, which involves
submitting it to the job queue. The Job
Queue window displays the encoding
status of the current job and an optional
preview of the output frames. The Job Queue
also lists Pending and Completed jobs, so
you can display the job properties, and
disable or remove pending jobs.
The Outputs
section of the Job window also lists the
status of each Tasks within the job (ready,
pending, encoding, complete), and the Log
section lists the processing steps and
timing.
Cleaner XL
provides an incredible amount of flexibility
in defining, saving, and reusing groups of
settings, nested from entire jobs down to
the details of encoding, filters, and even
destination folders. Once you make the
effort to define common formats and
processing for your work, or for your shop,
you then can automate your work by loading
and applying these setting and presets.
Even
better, cleaner supports Watch Folder jobs,
which monitor the contents of shared folders
and automatically processes any new source
media files that are found there. In this
way, for example, you can set up a dedicated
encoding server machine running cleaner XL,
and have it monitor various folders across
the network for new work that has been
created at individual editing workstations.
As you have
seen, this dramatically new interface for
cleaner XL can help well-organized people
design a collection of custom settings for
video and audio processing. Ideally, you can
have your in-house video processing expert
define preferred house settings in all their
gory detail, and then even package up the
actual processing using Watch Folders.
However,
the cleaner XL interface is certainly less
approachable for novice or occasional users.
In particular, it does not provide
convenient overall views of available
options and settings. Instead of a
hierarchical Explorer-type view, you must
use a file open-type interface to browse
each individual sub-folder, and then load
each preset setting in order to view the
details of its contents. Similarly, while
the main Job Window interface does list the
source files and a summary of the output
profiles, it provides no indication whether
any filters have been enabled, much less
which ones.
Beyond the
interface changes, cleaner XL is clearly an
important update, with its support for all
the new media formats and significant
performance improvements, especially on
multi-processor architectures. Discreet does
offer a trial version of cleaner XL that you
can download and try out for 30 days. It can
process up to 50 jobs, and stamps a
watermark on all output video. So whether
you are a novice, or an encoding
professional, try it out for a change.
to get cleaner
XL from B&H for only $499.50 - get
cleaner upgrade for just $179
Canopus -
ProCoder
www.canopuscorp.com
Discreet -
cleaner
www.discreet.com/products/cleaner
Manifest
Technology®
Copyright 1999-2003, Douglas
Dixon, All Rights Reserved
Manifest Technology is a
registered trademark of Douglas Dixon
|
