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company: Media 100
contact: 800-577-3443 or 508-460-1600, http://www.media100.com
price: $599 (SRP), $179 (upgrade)
requirements: Mac OS 8.6.1 or later; QuickTime 4 or later; 64MB of RAM; 10MB of free hard disk space; CD-ROM or DVD; 800 by 600, 16-bit display; DV camera or deck for DV video capture
Reviewed by Tom Wolsky
Everyone who purchases Final Cut Pro receives Media Cleaner EZ as a free download from Media100, which now owns Terran Interactive, the creators of Media Cleaner Pro and all its offspring. EZ is a fine tool and great for QuickTime compression, but its capabilities are limited. Fortunately, it has a big brother in Cleaner 5, the latest release of Terran's industry standard software.
There truly is nothing else that compares to Cleaner 5. You can do simple compression from inside FCP or with the QuickTime Player, but for a complete tool with access to a wide variety of codecs and interactive tools, there is only one Cleaner. Anybody who plans on doing more than casual QuickTime compression needs Cleaner. It gives users access to many formats such as Real, MPEG1 and 2, Windows and more. The permutations Cleaner can achieve are almost endless; I'm sure some mathematical whiz could work it out, but it's going to be in the millions. Take a look at this.
This is the full list of Cleaner options, with every available setting. Think how many variations you can create when you add in frame rates, image size and sampling rates.
Cleaner may appear complex and intimidating, but it's really quite benign. Getting started however, can be a bit tricky. The first thing you should do after you load Cleaner, even before you restart your computer, is quit the installer and open your System Folder, inside Extensions and find these two items which Cleaner loads, RadDVCodec and RadDVDecoder. These are the Radius DV codec extensions that are used with EditDV or MotoDV. If you're using FCP, get them out of there. The trash is probably the best place for them. Then reboot your system. This is a bugbear that has plagued a number of DV users.
The second thing you should do is head over to the Terran web site and, after registering your product of course, get the most recent Cleaner update. takes you to the download page where you'll find the 5.0.1 bug fixer. I don't really know what it fixes, but if it's squishing bugs, I'm all for it.
Next, thumb through the manual. Yes, there actually is a paper manual, not just a PDF, or worse, online help. As manuals go it's quite good -- full of useful information that goes beyond explaining how to use the application to detailing the nuances of compression, especially in the section called Architecture & Formats. Here, the various video formats are explained and suggestions offered for achieving excellent results.
Getting from here to there is the one of the simplest parts of the compression process -- here being Final Cut Pro and there being Cleaner 5. From FCP you can export either single clips or whole sequences. Under the File menu go to Export>Final Cut Pro movie. A dialogue box appears with a checkbox at the bottom for Make self-contained movie. The default is checked, but you should uncheck the box. This will create an FCP reference file which points back to the original media. That's it. FCP will render out any rendering that needs to be done. It will mix down the audio and output a relatively small file. You are now ready to go into Cleaner.
This is the Cleaner interface, and if you like GUIs with the techno-Matrix look then you'll like this. Despite its sinister appearance, Cleaner isn't really so threatening. It has two great advantages: its ease of use and its complexity. It may sound contradictory, but in this case, the two go hand in hand.
Cleaner's ease of use is in its Settings Wizard. To work with Cleaner all you have to do is drag the clips or files you want to compress into an empty project window. From FCP all you have to do is drag that small reference file you created into the Cleaner project window. Double click on the blank Settings column and you'll call up the Settings Window.
At the bottom is the button Use Wizard. This opens a dialogue with Cleaner that walks you through setting up your compression parameters. It asks questions about what you want to achieve while offering brief explanations of your options. Cleaner uses your answers to create the optimal set of parameters for your compressed file.
The first choices are for the World Wide Web, CD/DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, Kiosk, DV and even Still Picture. This covers the choices most users will want.
If you pick one, let's say WWW, and click Continue you then move on to a another series of questions. What you choose in each one of the steps affects what questions are next asked. It's a simple, elegant system, which produces remarkably good results with only a little tweaking. Let's go through a typical WWW settings scheme. Selecting WWW and clicking Continue will take you to this page.
Here you get to choose your primary format from one of the big three: QuickTime, Real or Windows Media. Selecting QuickTime takes you to Delivery Style. I went for quality over speed.
So far the questions have been fairly easy, but now they're starting to get a little trickier, into the $16,000 range. Who will be your primary viewer, and what kind of a connection is he or she likely to have? Here is one of the beauties of Cleaner; in your batch list you can set up a string of renders, each with different parameters, which allow you to quickly and easily make a number of different download options available to your viewers.
One of the advantages of the batch list is that it allows you to prioritize the order in which the items on the list will be compressed.
This helps to define what's important about your content; it also helps you choose which audio compressor is best suited to your material. I've opted for quality over speed again. Some windows, such as this and the next, allow you to pick multiple options.
Note the ability to fade in and out of the audio and video. This can be pretty neat for some clips that you want to put on the web.
Here's what Cleaner worked out as its optimal solution for creating the best video based on the answers I provided. Every option can be overridden and replaced with new values using pop-ups and numeric windows. Notice in the bottom left of the window the Save Settings button. Once you've set a compression scheme the way you like it, you never have to do it again for similar material; just call up your saved settings file.
Quick, simple, easy to use and excellent results, as you can see all over the web. The Wizard is the starting point for this application, but there is a great deal of subtlety underlying its simplicity, and getting to know the application is well worth the effort.
One of Cleaner's lovely features is the ability to actually edit in the application. If you have a number of clips that you need to compress, clips made up of lengthy series of shots, you can actually mark in and out points, specifying which sections to compress. I've used this to create clips from DV master clips to make PhotoJPEG clips for tutorials.
The Cleaner interface actually lets you see what the outcome of your compression will look like both before you compress your material and while its being compressed. Dynamic preview is a tool that really lets you see what's going to happen to your material as you adjust settings; it shows you immediately the results different settings will produce, however painful that might sometimes be. While material is being compressed, Cleaner gives you a Before and After look of your video by splitting the screen in half; the left side shows Before compression, the right side After.
Cropping is essential for working with digital video intended for a medium other than television display. You've probably noticed that all video creates black edges that aren't seen on television displays, but are immediately apparent on the web and other mediums. Cleaner has excellent and intelligent cropping tools that allow for pixel aspect ratios and maintaining frame aspect ratios, while letting you go beyond that to any kind of creative cropping you can imagine. 
QuickTime has a number of effects built into the format, and Cleaner doesn't forget them. Effects such as Clouds and Emboss and Fire can be accessed directly from the Cleaner interface and applied as the material is being compressed, saving the need to pre-render them in Final Cut Pro. In addition to QT effects, watermarks can be added to your compressed images, little corner bugs for instance that identify the provenance of the material.
Compression, though a key element in what Cleaner does, is only part of what it can do. The application has been designed to access the interactive capabilities of QuickTime and other formats using what Media100 calls EventStream. With EventStream you have access to titling at the bottom of QuickTime video display, which is much better than compressing it into the picture. You also have chapter tracks, allowing the viewer to skip to designated points in the video. You can create hotspots on your video that open up a great list of options.
You can pause the video and link to specified URLs. EventStream can be programmed to change graphics on the page that is displaying the video as it progresses. All this is built into Cleaner. For a complete demonstration of what EventStream technology can do
check out Vertical Online's demo page. The bandwidth-challenged should proceed with caution and a great deal of patience.
Cleaner 5 is very much a Terran product; the manual still says Terran and it still has its own web site. Only on the manual's title page is there a tiny indication at the bottom of the page that it is "A Media100 Company." There is one stark difference in my opinion; I don't believe the Terran of old would have let Cleaner 5 out the door without Toast compatibility on the Mac. Not being able to create an MPEG1 video CD with Toast, the world's most widely used CD burning software, is a considerable mistake.
Cleaner does have some quirks that I could do without. When you click Finish, you get asked where you want to save your file. If you've used the Wizard what you probably don't realize at first is that in addition to the QT movie you created for the web, Cleaner also creates an HTML page with the movie embedded in it. It's even worse if streaming video, where a whole string of HTML code pages get created. I guess this helps some people, but I can't see this as a great benefit. Most web site creators are probably using some software package that easily embeds video and audio into their own style sheets. Generating these pages is the default setting and will always appear when you use the Wizard. You can switch it off by going in the Advanced Settings menu. Under output there is a checkbox where you can switch HTML off. You will have to switch it off for every WWW setting you create. Considering there is an option in Preferences allowing you to change the color of your Cleaner interface, I would have thought that a more obvious option for not creating these superfluous HTML pages would have been created.
When you launch the application, it opens the last batch list you created, much like FCP. Personally I find this a pain. The other interface oddity is that you can't close a batch list. You can start a new batch list, or you can quit the app, but for some reason, the simple little close box in the upper left hand corner was omitted. If you just set up a batch and quit the app, you're probably wondering where this came from. Well, Cleaner saves batches, unbidden, in its application folder. Take a look in there some time, but open it carefully. It's like a child's messy room; there are no fewer than 38 items in there and that doesn't include any stray batch lists it has created.
I don't care for the way it handles still exports either, though why you'd bother to go into Cleaner for this I don't know. I would have thought that Cleaner could intelligently interpret pixel aspect ratios and correct them in the Wizard, but it can't. You have to do it in advanced settings, and even then it doesn't interpret DV correctly. If you set the output to 4:3 it creates a 720x540 still, rather than a 720x534 still. It's a minor quibble, and much of what bothers me about Cleaner are niggling, picky interface quirks, but after coming from the elegant complexity of Final Cut, Cleaner seems a bit of a let down.
Cleaner's GUI may not be completely to my taste, but what it does, it does very well. It does excellent work on almost all compressions. But the real trick to creating video for the web and other compressed formats lies not only in a compression program like Cleaner, but in the content creation, as Media100 likes to call it. The real art is in making video that is suitable for compression: video with little movement, no quick zooms or pans, no text scrolling across the bottom of the screen and no transitions, even simple ones like dissolves. All of these will make the compression process rebel and throw up a barricade of pixel blocks.
Whether or not your video has these problems, Cleaner 5 is your best hope of making it palatable once it's in a compressed state. Compression is modern day alchemy, and the results are sometimes as unpredictable, but if there is a philosopher's stone in this new dark art, its name is Cleaner.
Tom Wolsky Tom graduated with honors from the London School of Film Technique, spent several years as a screenwriter; then worked at ABC News' London Bureau and in New York as a producer and operations manager for nearly 20 years at World News Tonight, World News Now, and Good Morning America. He's been teaching Television and Video in Northern California since 1992 and added Final Cut Pro to his editing repertoire last year.
He has his own production company, South Coast Productions, which is based on the Media100, and is currently working on a short documentary for the Mendocino Land Trust.
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(This article was originally published on 2-pop.com and is reprinted here with permission.)