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Autodesk Cleaner XL 1.5 replacement
Hello there.
We’ve been using Autodesk Cleaner XL for years now with great results for what we need. 90% of the time we need to produce h.264 .movs for work in progress uploads.
We’ve recently upgraded our operating systems to 64-bit Server 2008, and while Cleaner seems to work 98% of the time, we’ve been getting the odd errors here and there which we can only put down to it’s incompatability with our OS.
Been trying to research the possibility of a replacement since these bugs are starting to appear.
I’m hoping someone can recommend other software to get the same sort of results we get from Cleaner, that will work with our Server 2008 systems.
Been looking at Procoder 3 and Sorenson Squeeze 5 but the later doesn’t do h264 .movs and Procoder 3 doesn’t have a trial version!Unfortunately, our higher-ups don’t want to budge from the h264 .movs as they work for clients and they are happy with the results.
Another bonus which we love about Cleaner is it will take image sequences (we commonly work with dpx and openEXR). Haven’t found another tool out there that does this yet.
Ideally we’d stay on PC (we have Compressor on our Final Cut Machine but we all hate using it for various reasons).
Any idea if they are planning on updating Cleaner any time soon? They obviously haven’t for years!
Thanks in advance for the replies and opinions and sorry for the long-winded post.
Bram
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8 Replies
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I should also specify that we are also keen on “multi-pass” for our H.264 to help the quality and minimize files sizes.
We use Premiere CS3 but that doesn’t support multi-pass for h.264 quicktimes.
We’ll be upgrading to CS4 shortly. Doesn’t Adobe Media Encoder CS4 do multi-pass h.264 .movs?
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Autodesk will never make a significant update to cleaner.
Take a look at Epiosde from Telestream which is available for Mac and PC and has trial versions available:
https://www.telestream.net/episode/overview.htm
IMO it’s better than Squeeze and Procoder
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There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs. We don’t. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say “Would you buy a new version because of bugs?” You won’t get a single person to say they’d buy a new version because of bugs. We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis.Bill Gates. Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995)
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Daniel beat me to it. I second Episode. There’s a Windows and Mac version. Mac version also comes with a plugin that works with Compressor. Good fast H.264 encoding using Dicas codec.
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For something completely different you might want to look at CompressHD. It’s hardware based PCIe card specifically designed for very fast H.264 encoding. Mac and Windows although very new to Windows. It will work with Adobe Media Encoder on Windows and Compressor on Mac. You can probably just move the card if you had motive to switch encode OS.
https://www.matrox.com/video/media/pdf/products/max/en_Max_datasheet.pdf
I did a Mac based review on the COW
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/seeman_craig/matrox_compressHD.php -
Thanks for the responses.
I forgot about Episode. We have taken a look at it and it does look the most likely.
I love the idea of the compressHD card but with all the cards in our current machines (AJA Xena, Fibre channel card etc) I don’t think we have any more room!Biggest problem we have is a lack of funding at the moment so Episode is probably out of the question for now. Might have to plod along with Cleaner until the bugs we’re seeing become more of a problem.
Daniel, when you say Autodesk will never make a “significant” update to Cleaner, are you suggesting there may be a small update? Like something that will make it work on a 64-bit OS or something? Or perhaps that’s not a “small” change?
We really like Cleaner. It’s old and it’s probably a little slow, but it never lets us down.
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It’s been years since it’s been updated and last I heard the development team has moved elsewhere. At least with *Edit they had the courtesy to announce EOL. I think Ed Wood has a better chance of winning a Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy than Cleaner getting even a bug fix update.
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Get out your credit card and buy Episode today. You will never look back, it’s that good. And it’s good at a slew of things, as well as H264.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
[Bram Tulloch] “Daniel, when you say Autodesk will never make a “significant” update to Cleaner, are you suggesting there may be a small update? Like something that will make it work on a 64-bit OS or something? Or perhaps that’s not a “small” change?
“They are likely to make minor updates but nothing like making it 64bit. The application needs to be re-written (it’s written in .net) and the interface overhauled completely. (it’s one of the worst commercial UI’s I’ve used, other than Windows in general of course!)
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There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs. We don’t. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say “Would you buy a new version because of bugs?” You won’t get a single person to say they’d buy a new version because of bugs. We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis.Bill Gates. Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995)
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