WWUG Spotlight
Media Cleaner Pro 101

by Jeffrey R. Handy
Bisk Publishing, Tampa, Fla.

Another defining feature of Media Cleaner Pro is its ability to automatically create a master movie for all of your alternates to play from. This replaces the need for MakeRefMov and automates the process. Say you want to create a movie for your client to see. The client wants his or her customers to see it too. Your client has a nice T1 connection, and their customer has an ISDN connection. You will create two different movies and group them together in Media Cleaner Pro.

You also have the option of having Media Cleaner Pro create subfolders and HTML automatically. This is a real time-saver. In this example you may want to create a Quicktime streaming file for the ISDN user and a Progressive download file for the Client. This will allow the client to see the highest quality possible over the net and the customer to see it at decent quality, unless the customer also has a high-speed connection.

Once you have the two presets or custom settings selected, you can choose "Alternate" to group the alternate data-rate movies together. Once the compression is completed, if you have chosen to have Media Cleaner Pro create your subfolders and HTML, you will then have a master folder with all of the necessary files to post to your server(s).

Power Suite is Media Cleaner Pro on steroids. Using multiprocessor technology, Media Cleaner Pro and Blue ICE increases encoding speed up to 10 times. I have two of these suites myself running with a pair original 1.0 Blue ICE cards. I was in some disbelief about the timesavings until I bought one and saw it in action.

Power Suite increases the speed of mainly the Sorenson codec. If you don't use this codec, you may not need the Power Suite. However, there are some other functions that are "ICEd". For instance, decoding of your input codec (available for Media 100, Avid, several MJPEG flavors and DV). This uses the ICE hardware to boost the input speed decreasing the process no matter what output codec you are encoding to. Cropping, scaling, deinterlacing, image adjustments and other Media Cleaner Pro filters are ALL ICE accelerated as well: no matter what codec you are encoding to. So, my advice to people considering the Power Suite is this: If you have a Blue ICE 1.0 or Ultra card, spend the extra money for the software upgrade for sure. If you are encoding or plan to encode more than an hour of footage using Sorenson, buy the Power Suite for sure. If you don't fall into one of these categories, you may want to consider a separate compression system--preferably a G4 or Pentium III.

The key to Media Cleaner Pro and Terran's success has been: major timesavings in normally labor-intensive tasks. Media Cleaner Pro means increased productivity and revenue. These advantages are tenfold if you use the Power Suite. Any way you cut it, if compressing video for Web, CD or kiosk; you MUST have Media Cleaner Pro in some form. Good luck, happy compressing and I will see you on the WWUG site.

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