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terran Interactive introduced Media Cleaner Pro (nee Movie Cleaner) some four years ago without much fanfare or a splashy ad campaign. Moreover, it was a tool that, on the surface, did a job that could already be done from within a video editor like Adobe's Premiere. Yet today, Media Cleaner has become a staple of any serious digital media production studio. It got there by doing a specific function, compressing video for digital distribution, very well.
Originally a multimedia production company itself, Terran Interactive first developed Media Cleaner as an internal tool to improve their own work-flow, automating repeated operations, and creating tools to increase image quality. Not surprisingly, since they were solving the same daily hassles faced by other content developers, business acquaintances quickly became interested in their tools-so much so that Terran switched their business.
Initially a Macintosh-only product, Media Cleaner Pro 4.0 ($499) is the first version available for Windows, supporting 95/98 and NT. With the exceptions of its use of Windows conventions and a few first-version bugs, Cleaner 4.0 doesn't lose much in the translation from the Mac. There are a few minor interface annoyances, but if you regularly compress video for digital distribution, Media Cleaner offers two distinct advantages that make it well worth the price of admission: better quality and greater efficiency. so what does cleaner clean?
Media Cleaner is not a video editor; in fact, Terran has planned, but thus far avoided, adding a potentially valuable timeline interface lest it confuse the market. Nor is it a tool for "creating" content. Rather, Media Cleaner advances the unglamorous art of compressing digital media files for low and mid-level data rate distribution, like CD-ROM and the Web.
Media Cleaner's primary benefit is increased image quality. Squeezing full-motion video down to less than one percent of its original data rate is often accomplished by brute force. But Media Cleaner offers a collection of noise reduction and blur filters, as well as other tools, that assist in making the most out of the limited bits available.
For example, since noise is the most difficult aspect of video to compress, noise filters eliminate random pixels type cal of signal noise, thus saving more data bits for the actual picture. Blurring filters, similarly, massage...