Creative Mac Review: Terran's Media Cleaner Pro

Terran’s Media Cleaner Pro
If you don't buy it, there's something wrong with you

I've worked with a lot of compression formats. Often, however, the way a particular application may encode in the desired format leaves something to be desired. For example, a few years ago, while I was teaching an Avid class, a student wanted to compress her five-minute music video so she could burn it to CD-ROM. She wanted to be able to put the video on an interactive CD so the band could promote themselves to record companies.

Media Cleaner
Pro Summary

Publisher: Terran Interactive
URL: http://www.terran.com
Price/Availability: Media Cleaner Pro 4.0.2 has a MSRP of $499, and Media Cleaner EZ sells for $99. Both products are available now.
Overall Impression: Quality and size are key issues, this product takes care of both turning out great compressed video.
Key Benefits: Ease of use. The wizard makes it easy to turn out high quality video even if you are not familiar with all the different compression schemes.
Disappointment: If you break out of wizard mode, you could end up with several trials and errors before getting something you like.
Recommendation: Strong buy.

An Avid system will allow you to export your video/audio information in a variety of different formats, including QuickTime. While the Avid system did compress the 2 GB music video, the smallest file size was 760 MB at 320 x 240. Not only would the video not allow for additional music-only content to be put on the CD, it wouldn't fit on a CD-ROM at all. When the student and I recompressed the original file to get it below 640 MB, the quality went right into the toilet.

That's the problem with editing applications: While they do offer some compression options, they often do not support advanced features needed to compress high-quality/low file size media.

Then along came Media Cleaner Pro. Media Cleaner Pro (currently in release 4.0.2) is the only cross-platform tool that outputs all the major formats for delivery on the Web, CD-ROM, DVD, broadband, kiosk and presentation. Media Cleaner Pro 4 currently reads a wide range of formats and outputs high-quality QuickTime, RealSystem G2, Windows Media (ASF), MPEG-1, AVI, DV, still images, audio-only formats and more. Version 4 also supports optional upgrades to MPEG-2 and can losslessly convert between formats.

We used Media Cleaner EZ (a light version of the Pro software) and were able to keep the image size at 320 x 240 and keep the image quality high but lower the file size to 30 MB. If you want to test Media Cleaner Pro on a project you are working on, Terran Interactive offers a crippled, free download of Media Cleaner Pro, and, for only a few dollars, you can purchase Media Cleaner EZ.

You've probably seen Media Cleaner Pro in action if you were one of the millions who downloaded the Star Wars Episode 1 Trailer from the Apple site or visited CNN Interactive to view an archived story or watched our own DMNTV, which uses Media Cleaner Pro 4 to compress their daily webcasts (along with the Media Cleaner Power Suite).

Media Cleaner Pro works with all major video capture cards, including Pinnacle System's Targa 2000 and Bravado, VideoVision Studio and Telecast, Avid Media Composer, Media 100, Miro capture cards and all AV Macintoshes.

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