Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
Appendix A | Appendix B | Appendix C | Glossary | Index | Legal Stuff | License


Chapter 3 - Media Cleaner's Features

The Media Cleaner Wizard | Batch Processing | Suspend & Resume | Settings Window | Preview Capabilities | Optimizing Filters | Adobe Premiere Export Module | Advanced Date Rate Control | News & Updates | Current Information via the Internet



Media Cleaner offers a unique combination of powerful features designed to make your compression tasks more efficient and easy. Being familiar with these features is helpful, so here is a brief overview of the most important features.

The Media Cleaner Wizard
(previously the "Movie Expert")

The Media Cleaner Wizard is a friendly "expert system" based on the knowledge of dozens of compression professionals. It discusses your movie and desired results with you, and then creates compression settings based on your needs.

If you are a beginning user, you don't need to know any technical details such as data rates, keyframe frequency and codec choices to get great results. Using the Wizard is also an excellent way to better understand the visual consequences of various trade-offs, such as what movies look like at different frame rates.

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Batch Processing

Media Cleaner Pro allows you to compress many movies at one time with its batch processing feature. You can create a batch list of up to 2,000 items by simply dragging the movies onto Media Cleaner Pro's program icon.

You may specify global "default" settings that will be applied to every movie in your list, as well as settings for individual movies. The same movie can be processed multiple times within a batch, which is useful for trying variations. You can also save batch logs for future reference.

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Suspend & Resume

Video compression can take many hours for large movies, even with an efficient tool like Media Cleaner. Media Cleaner allows you to interrupt your QuickTime movie compression at any point in order to use your computer for other applications, and then later resume compression when you choose. Media Cleaner will also let you view the partially compressed movie or shut down your computer without affecting your ability to later resume the compression.

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Settings Window

The Settings window gives you quick access to all the settings you need to process and compress a movie, such as codec selection, image size, audio rates, A/V fades, and much more. All the settings are also shown in a summary view for easy reference. You can even save your settings for future use, saving you time and ensuring consistency from movie to movie.

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Preview Capabilities

Before you start compressing your movies, Media Cleaner's Dynamic Preview lets you see how the compression parameters, filters, and image adjustments are altering your image. Plus, you can see the size of the processed frame compared to the original frame to determine if your filters are helping the image compress better.

During compression, a Before/After preview lets you compare your original uncompressed movie with your final compressed output so you can see exactly what the codec is doing to your image.

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Optimizing Filters

Media Cleaner has several filters to optimize your movies so that they compress better. These filters include the Adaptive Noise Reduction filter for removing video noise while maintaining sharp detail, and the Static Mask for eliminating video noise in unchanging areas.

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Adobe Premiere Export Module

Media Cleaner has a Premiere Export Module to streamline your production process. Simply edit your movies in Adobe Premiere and then export them to Media Cleaner for optimization and compression.

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Advanced Data Rate Control

Depending on the codec you choose, Media Cleaner has different methods of controlling the data rate of your movies. Media Cleaner's data rate control also allows you to effectively use "unlimited" codecs such as Video and JPEG ­ without Media Cleaner, these codecs often produce unplayable results.

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News & Updates

If you have an open network connection, Media Cleaner checks a special Internet site Terran maintains to download news about program updates and new technologies, such as codecs. These messages may periodically appear as new things happen in the multimedia world. News & Update messages can take you directly to web sites with more information if you are interested.

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Current Information via the Internet

Media Cleaner's Internet menu allows you to easily access current information on Terran's WWW site. This assures that the most up-to-date codec and technical support information is always available. Media Cleaner also can produce a useful System Configuration Log to help troubleshoot your system.

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