Cleaner Streaming Studio

This is intended to be a complete suite of applications for editing, encoding, and streaming DV footage in Windows media or Real formats. It can be used by companies for their product marketing and PR, educational institutions for distant learning, etc. It brings together three well-known Discreet products–Cleaner 5.1 (reviewed in PCQuest March 2002), Cinestream 3.1 (reviewed in May 2002) and Cleaner Live 2. A common installer installs these three components. However, the interfaces to these are independent of each other. 

Cinestream is a non-linear DV editing solution for post-production work. This allows you to do multi-track video and audio editing and also a host of transitions, titles etc. The application also interacts with your DV device to take video directly and edit it. This also incorporates a technology called EventStream, which let’s you add events that can be triggered during a webcast. Examples include a webpage opening for interactivity with the stream, Javascript programs running or Flash content

being displayed at specific instances along the timeline of a stream.

Cleaner 5 is a content mastering solution and finds use mostly in web streaming. It allows you to capture, author, apply filters, encode/compress and publish media in various well-known formats (RealMedia, Windows Media or QuickTime). Finally, Cleaner Live 2 is a program to deliver live web streaming content and also to archive it for on-demand use. This has a simple visual flow-chart kind of an interface that allows you to monitor the complete sequence chain of processes happening. It also has an event presenter that allows you to integrate MS PowerPoint slideshows into a Web stream. 

The Bottom Line: The product is priced at Rs 37,500 in the Indian market. At the time we reviewed Cleaner 5 and CineStream, they were priced at Rs 30,000 and Rs 25,000 respectively. So, as a bundle, Cleaner Streaming Studio is definitely an investment worth its price. 

Ashish Sharma at PCQ Labs