cleaner xl
 

Anyone have experience with cleaner XL, can people tell me the cons and pros about it?

Currently use premiere...so just wanted to get some opinions about it from other people.

Cleaner takes a bit of getting used to, something I'm still doing. I never did get my users guide from the company, so I'm just kind of fiddling with it and seeing what works and what doesn't.

The biggest pro over Premiere that I've found is SIMPLE batch jobs. Drag, drop, leave it.

The interface isn't as clean as I'd like and the learning curve is a bit of a pain, but it's definitely worth having in your software arsenal.

and it's great for a dual proc with hyperthreading so you can do 2 at once :)

Cleaner scalability in a multi node system with a san rocks....capture & encode on multiple machines simultaneously. As a one off, the batch processing through multi-formats rocks, other than that, or if you are just doing WM, stick with the microsoft tool.

I use Cleaner XL every day for encoding. Even with the manual you have to account for a little bit of a learning curve. The interface is also slow as molasses too, but it does do a great job for batch processing to multiple formats, eg. mpeg and wmv and real and in multiple bitrates and sizes (320x240, 640x480 etc). It took me months figure out how and where to save the encoding presets, but now that that is done, it is pretty quick for me to set up encoding jobs. Cleaner XL will let you add watermarks as .pngs in the encoding process which is much better for the integrity of the watermark text than adding them in your editing program beforehand and then compressing them when you encode.

Tip: You have to manually edit the encoding presets with a text editor like notepad to make custom mpeg-1 video frame sizes other than the available presets in the interface. (Eg you want a 512x 384 or 192x 144.) Unbelievably the designers left out a way to set that in the encoding options like you can with wmvs!

Its great but as said the interface is downright fucked. When I got the thing last year I had to post a $100 contest in GFY to answer a simple question. :upsidedow

But - I use it weekly now. Once you establish your setups you just drag hundreds of files to it and go on vacation.

www.vtc.com they have online video tutorials on it