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NOVEMBER 12, 2002 Discreet Cleaner 6
Performance and workflow Some--but not all--of the major new features of Cleaner 6 fall into the workflow and performance categories. And in these regards, Discreet has far surpassed the companies that previously put out Cleaner and Media Cleaner EZ/Pro. What's funny about this is that the companies that previously published Cleaner were extremely Mac-centric. And yet Discreet, a company that could never have been accused of being Mac-centric, has completely outdone them with Cleaner 6. [an error occurred while processing this directive] To give you an idea of how un-Mac-centric Discreet used to be, I'll relate a little anecdote. I met representatives from Discreet for the first time about a year before Combustion was released, give or take. At this meeting, I was the sole Mac journalist in a party of about five journalists at a trade show, all yacking about Discreet's plans for the future. During Discreet's presentation, I interrupted several times to ask a simple question about their various future products: "Will this work on Macs?" But never once did a Discreet representative assume I was talking about platform compatibility. They thought I was talking about interoperability with "Max"--as in "3D Studio Max"--a subject they were happy to address. In short, the Mac platform was the farthest thing from their minds. But with the release of Combustion and, more significantly, Combustion 2, Discreet began to put some serious development effort into the Mac (not "Max") platform to the point where, in terms of performance, they began to put competitors to shame. (Witness the dual-processor performance of Combustion 2 in our recent "Apple to Apples" benchmark study.) And now, with the release of Cleaner 6 for the Macintosh months ahead of the Windows counterpart, they've taken this dedication to the next level. Especially in terms of performance. Now, I've been in a professional environment that used Cleaner as its sole encoding engine for delivering QuickTime on the Web. It began with the Media Cleaner Pro suite accelerated with ICE boards (on the Mac) and ended with Cleaner 5 accelerated with nothing. But even with ICE on what was at the time the top of the line G4, encoding was a slow, painful process. Now, however, Cleaner 6 has been highly optimized for the G4 Velocity Engine and for multiple processors. I took the liberty of running some tests comparing the speeds of Cleaner 5 and Cleaner 6 on the same dual 1 GHz G4. All of the tests used presets from Cleaner 5 (listed below) on a 13-second QuickTime clip (live action) running 29.97 FPS at 720 x 486. And here are the results.
As you can see, Cleaner 6 cut encoding time roughly in half, and that's using settings imported from Cleaner 5. Native Cleaner 6 settings, which I can't really compare with Cleaner 5 native settings, are even more refined. What's more, on some settings, I was able to run a two-pass variable bitrate encode in Cleaner 6 in less time than it took for a constant bitrate encode in Cleaner 5. The MPEG-1 test in Cleaner 5, for example, took 185 seconds. In Cleaner 6, it took 29 seconds. And in Cleaner 6 running a two-pass VBR, it took 52 seconds, still less than a third the time it took Cleaner 5 to run a constant bitrate encode on the same machine. MPEG-2 results weren't as spectacular, but still a fair-dinkum decent. Prev 1 2 3 4 Next Related sites: • AV Video • Content Mastering • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • Digital Webcast • DV Format • DVD Creation • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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