The Age Old Question- Episode, Sorensen, or Cleaner?

[David Gordon]

My vote goes to Episode, I love cleaner but it’s so unloved by Autodesk and as such has been left behind in the performance stakes.

[David Roth weiss]

I think the answer really depends on the format you choose for delivery. If you choose Flash for example, there’s no reason to buy a $600 Swiss Army Knife to encode it, when Flix Pro will do the job as well or better for $249. If you choose to go with h.264 you might be able to “Squeeze” a better file out (pun intended) using Sorenson or Episode, but compressor and QT Pro do a pretty decent job. So again, why buy the expensive Swiss Army Knife unless you really need it?

I also say forget Cleaner… Discreet and now AutoDesk have never kept that product up to date.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Craig Seeman]

I think Swiss Army knives give maximum flexibility.

Episode is fastest for everything at the moment. It’s great for VP6.

Compressor is great for H.264 but multipass encodes will take a long time. ON2/Flix may well have a VP6 plugin that will work in Compressor but haven’t looked at that option. BTW Episode comes with a plugin for Compressor 3 now! Best of both worlds with that.

Squeeze is very easy to use but doesn’t have the processing filter control that Episode has. It’s a nice programe though.

Cleaner is SLOOW and Autdesk provides very little support. If you run into a bug with Cleaner don’t expect a bug fix for a long time if ever. It’s the only one I’d list as a must to avoid.

BTW, I have and use ALL of the above (except Flix).

[Jim Gunn]

I do a LOT of video encoding from Dv and hdv sources and I have been using Cleaner XL (now ver 1.5) for pc for years. It does a great job with batch video encoding to multile formats and has sophisticated controls including color correction and audio filters and many other things.

I have also used the latest version of Sorenson Squeeze (4.5) and it has a somewhat friendlier interface than Cleaner XL and encodes much faster, especially for Flash video which it handles beautifully. However one major thing Squeeze lacks is the ability to add a watermark to the finished videos during the encoding process like Cleaber XL can. That is a major flaw and that is the main reason that I still use Cleaner XL 1.5 to encode to WMV, Quicktime, Real and other formats for my clients.

[Craig Seeman]

Episode also does watermarks and even burn in time code.

[Jason Griffith]

Ok guys,

I think I’m going to go with Episode. It’s more expensive than the other options, but then again, this is my product and it needs to look great. Not to mention I will be compressing hundreds of 10-15 minute clips. I need the speed.

Jason

“An Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living” – Socrates

[Victoria Hansen]

Hi David,

I came upon your reply while searching for compression software. I have Sorensen Squeeze, but regrettably know little about it. I have successfully compressed audio and video files, but have some TV segments I did on a regional network here in Australia that I want to upload as flash on my website http://www.bitesizecooking.com Problem is, using ‘sml prog’ swf, I still can’t get these small enough for the site. My programmers have told me to try to get them around 5mg if possible. A friend who is an editor mentioned one might be able to set a compression limit for the file, but I don’t know enough about the software to do that. Can this be done with Sorensen and if so, how, and if not, can you recommend another easy to use compression software I can use. I’m relatively web and computer savvy but not editing savvy.

regards
Victoria
victoria@victoriahansen.com