-
Anyone try Cleaner 6.5 yet? Should I go elsewhere?
The Subject basically says it all.
We’ve upgraded a FCP suite to FCP5, with QT7 and tiger and all the rest, and have lost cleaner, which we used frequently to encode quicktimes and F4M.
Should I spend the money for the upgrade, or put the money towards a different compression suite? Does cleaner have a future with Autodesk?
Squeeze and Compression Master both look good, but that’s $500+ that might be hard to get past management (they are traditionally tight asses).
If I’ve got Compressor giving me MPEG2, and Cleaner for most everything else, am I missing out? Should I go with one of the others, and get an all in one system?
I’m edging towards Squeeze, only becuase we use the Sorenson 3 codec frequently, and I heard that the FLVs out of squeeze are better.I know there’s others that are probably agonizing over these same issues. Any help, opinions, or comments would be welcome.
Praise to the COW
BrAd Steiner
ImageWorks Media Group -
6 Replies
-
Squeeze 4.3 update was released today. Comes with an FLV player. YAA! You have to pay another $199 though for the On2 Flash codec but the includec codec seems to work fine. They’ve added metadata support for Flash. They seem to be using their own AVC (H.264) instead of Apple’s
Waiting for my Cleaner 6.5 upgrade. Autodesk says they’re on back order and might be as much as 2 weeks or so before I get it.
-
Squeeze does use its own H.264 encoder, and it pales compared to Apple’s (haven’t tested 4.3’s encoder though). It does sound like BrAd would be best served by going with Squeeze, as its SV3 and FLV encoding tools are excellent. I would just stick with Compressor for both MPEG-2 and H.264. If you need to do high-quality Real, WMV-9 (Squeeze can do this also with separate purchase of one of the Flip4Mac products), or MPEG-4, then Compression Master would get my vote.
-
At some point when I come up for air I’m going to compare Squeeze’s AVC to Apple’s H.264 in Compressor. BTW Squeeze 4.3 is out today so don’t judge by what you saw in Squeeze which didn’t do justice to H.264 (I’m being polite).
-
I did some short encodes last night using Squeeze 4.3 and Compressor 2 w/ QT 7.0.4. In my mind, Squeeze is still very much behind in terms of quality in encoding to H.264. Sorenson may have slightly optimized their H.264 encoder for better speed with 4.3, but I don’t think the core quality components of it were touched, at least not too much.
I used the default settings from Squeeze for H.264 at 720p and 1080p (normal). I then replicated those settings to match best I could with Compressor. The source I was using was a 1080i BlackMagic Uncompressed clip. Squeeze was only slightly slower with its 2pass encoding versus Apple’s multipass encoding now. Previously, it was much slower if I recall correctly. Also, Squeeze still has the deinterlacing bug (or is it not a bug and that it is just not good?) all the way from 4.0. It appears that Apple has fixed their deinterlacing issues however with the recent update to Compressor.
Overall though, with the updates to Flash encoding that 4.3 brings to Squeeze, this is a very nice update. What Squeeze has done well in the past, it does even better now. What it didn’t too well before, doesn’t appear to have been addressed with this release. And I’m fine with that.
-
And one has to wonder why the moved away from Apple’s variant of H.264 which I believe as available but “not well implemented” in Squeeze 4.1
-
I got the cleaner upgrade because it was $125 and I got the FLV encoder. I am familiar with the interface and it can set up a bunch of batches with many different settings to the same clip. Compressor is good for MPEG-2, but I don’t like the interface. I thought Sorenson Squeeze had a worse interface and looked like a 1.0 piece of software. Sorenson makes great codecs, but a clunky interface.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up