As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
Now that high quality digital video editing software like Sonic Foundrys's Vegas 4 costs as little as a few hundred dollars, all sorts of people are producing videos of everything from family gatherings to music demo reels to television documentaries. But before a video file is ready to burn to DVD or broadcast on the web, it usually requires some polishing and compression.
Two apps that will help get your video files distribution ready are Discreet's cleaner XL and SmartSound's Sonicfire Pro 3. cleaner XL is geared for compressing and transcoding video and audio files, while Sonicfire Pro 3 is an automated soundtrack tool.
Discreet's cleaner XL
The last version of cleaner was version 5. It worked on both PC and Mac, and if you've done much work with digital video, you're probably familiar with it. cleaner XL is a significant upgrade, with scads of new code, much of it rewritten from the ground up. Currently it's Windows only.
The paint wasn't quite dry when cleaner XL shipped last March. Installation was less than smooth, and I experienced several lockups. Then in mid July Discreet released a Service Pack for the program and I decided to give it another chance. Happily, the Service Pack takes care of both issues.
cleaner XL's interface appears similar to cleaner 5's, but the workflow is actually quite different, and I found myself initially confused. After messing around with it for a while, I decided to wipe my brain of all previous knowledge about cleaner 5 and treat XL as a brand new version 1.0 program, after which everything immediately got better.
Is .NET a Good Thing?
cleaner XL is the first program I've worked with that relies heavily on .NET services. In cleaner XL's case, .NET is intricately involved with drawing all the display menus, windows, and palettes the program uses. .NET's been around for a while now, but it's surprising how little most people know about it, including a lot of the folks who create the programs that use it.
After I installed the XL Service Pack, some of the window text and panes didn't show up. So I uninstalled and reinstalled the program, ran the Service Pack again, and this time they reappeared. But now a small part of the video Preview window overlapped the Source window, with the result that I wasn't able to grab the little draggable handle that determines the Out point of the video clip you're working on.
The fix for this was to reduce the system font size, which I had set to 125 percent, back to Normal, which makes the text on our 1600 x 1200 Eizo F980 display teeny tiny. Actually, that didn't work either until I rebooted the system. In the end, it all came together, but it took a fair amount of head scratching to get there.
The advantage of the .NET scheme seems to be that windows can be designed with a more contextual interface, eliminating the need, for example, for an endless series of OK buttons as you modify your program preferences. As implemented in XL, some windows never really close. You can minimize them, but they don't go away. I can't really tell yet how much of this is inherent to .NET, and how much of the implementation burden is on the shoulders of the software developers. How well .NET works in practice only time will tell. I do see potential advantages, but apparently it's not entirely baked yet.
XL In Action
cleaner XL will appeal to two distinct sets of users. The first group is made up of sophisticated developers who need to get down and dirty with exactly how their video and audio files are tweaked and compressed. The other set consists of people who aren't prepared to drill down that deep, but still need a reliable set of preset templates to transform their data with.
Experienced users will be pleased by the depth of XL's optimization and encoding features. You can fade video clips up and down, crop, scale, crop, blur, sharpen, and scale them. There are tools for interlace removal, 3 2 pull down film rate restoration, and you can correct color independently for each color channel. You can also watermark your encoded files, and have the watermark link to a web url.
Audio controls have not been ignored. There are parametric EQ controls to get rid of rumbles such as jet noise, and specific audio filters for hum removal and off axis microphone noise reduction. You can normalize audio tracks and use dynamic compression to make them more consistent.
Inputs and Outputs
XL comes with over 180 preconfigured job templates that yield excellent results for those who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of digital video arcana. Input profiles for different media types ensure your pixel aspect ratios are correct, for example, and output profiles guarantee your files have the proper frame rate.
The program supports sixty output formats, including MPEG 4, MPEG 2, RealMedia, QuickTime 6, and Windows Media 9 (WM9), with 5.1 and 7.1 audio support. WM9 can now display High Definition video (HD), which even compressed to 3 Mbits per second, results in very impressive full screen images that represent a huge step forward for desktop video. XL also supports the Kinoma output to Palm OS PDAs.
A nice XL feature is that all changes are made in the job document, rather than through individual settings made to a file. This makes it easy to share setups with other participants in a networked team. Another significant advance is that the setup and encoding processes are separate, so you can be setting up jobs while encoded files are rendering.
You can preview your output renders by writing them to temp files. Like previous versions of cleaner, you can reposition a vertical filter edge line in the Output Monitor that shows you Before and After versions of your filtered and compressed file. You can also grab the actual Before clip and pan it so that it exactly matches what's displayed in the After window, an extremely useful feature.
Files can dragged to Watch Folders that keep you updated on the progress of your job from across a network. You can override and insert new jobs in the order queue, and have multiple batch outputs from a single document. When everything's cooked, you can publish instantly to either a burn station or a streaming web server.
Cleaner XL is the kind of app that takes advantage of all the horsepower and RAM you can throw at it. It's HyperThreaded to enhance multiprocessor performance, which worked very efficiently on our Compaq W8000 dual 2.8 GHz workstation.
Interface
The comparison to Canopus's ProCoder 1.5, another fine program that has many of the same capabilities, is inevitable. One area ProCoder is still ahead is its interface design. The individual elements of cleaner XL's interface are very good, but there are still a lot of floating windows, and more than once it took me some effort to figure out where to find a particular function. ProCoder's interface is locked down, so you always know where everything is.
Since cleaner XL is in the same desktop product division as Discreet's combustion 2, which has one of the best interfaces ever designed, perhaps there will be some "look and feel" consolidation in the next version. Another combustion 2 feature that would be great for XL is the Schematic View that lets you plug all sorts of inputs and outputs together without resorting to windows and palettes at all, a perfect solution for a program with such a wide range of variables.
Overall, my impression of cleaner XL (with Service Pack 1 installed) is very positive. It should be able to handle any compression job you throw at it, from DVD authoring to web streaming. It retails for $599.
SmartSound's Sonicfire Pro 3
The sure sign of an amateurish video or film production is bad sound. Yet, audio remains the neglected stepchild of the video world. With SmartSound's $299 Sonicfire Pro 3, there's no longer any excuse for producing a video with a cheesy soundtrack.
One big problem with creating film soundtracks is that competent composers and musicians are expensive. So is buying rights to existing material. Timing's also an issue. Film scores are usually composed after a film's been edited, so that the music can be synced, or "massaged" to the onscreen action, resulting in very tight sound production deadlines.
Sonicfire is a dedicated soundtrack creation program that aims to alleviate both these situations. The software works in concert with a series of several dozen royalty free audio CDs produced by SmartSound that cover a wide range of themed musical styles such as Action, Comedy, Sports, Jazz, Sound Effects, and many more.
It Really Works
I tend to treat canned material as highly suspect, but I have to say that SmartSound has come up with a system that really works. The audio files on the CDs are not simple WAV or AIFF recordings. The tracks are broken up into what SmartSound refers to as "Smart Blocks" that are made up of smaller "Segment Blocks," short clips of music that can be rearranged, copied, or deleted from the timeline. This gives you enormous flexibility in creating custom variations of the sound files.
The operation of the program is a simple as it gets. Version 3's interface is similar to previous versions, but much cleaner. You can display audio waveforms and add, delete, and rename Markers. Once you've imported the material you want, you can examine the Blocks, then drag your selections to a single dedicated soundtrack that's linked to a video Monitor preview window.
You can lengthen or shorten selections simply by dragging the ends of the sound clip, and Sonicfire will intelligently figure out how to smoothly blend the clip so that the expansion or contraction is undetectable. It will also crossfade between sequential selections on the timeline.
Although the program works best with "Blocked" files, you can add any sound source to the timeline. Using the "Smart Razor" tool, you can shorten, cut, rearrange, and blend the edit points of these files as well. Using Blocking and Razoring, you can create frame accurate, project specific soundtracks that run anywhere from seconds to hours in length.
Finished soundtracks can be saved with or without the associated movie clip. Files can be exported directly to Adobe's Premiere and After Effects, Microsoft's PowerPoint, Apple's FinalCut Pro, and several other popular editing applications.
An aspect of the program I wasn't sold on at first, but which eventually won me over, is its Movie Maestro search tool. Maestro finds music selections based on criteria you determine, such as Background/Jazzy/Slow, and it comes up with a list of choices. If you're hooked up to the internet, you can preview and purchase the content from SmartSound on the spot. This scheme turns out to work remarkably well.
All the recordings on the SmartSound CDs feature a very high level of professionalism. They go for $99.95 apiece for 44 KB files, or $49.95 for 22 KB files. You can buy a 44 KB 3 Pack for $270. A $499 Pro bundle comes with the software and five CDs. Given the quality of the material, this is an extremely good deal.
Sonicfire Pro works with both Macs and PCs. Recommended.
