We soon will need to compress for web about 15 hours of lectures. Procoder express is much cheaper than Cleaner. Will it work for us? Any other compression software we should also look at.

what format are you starting with and what format will you end up with?

also look at sorenson squeeze, current version.

I have both procoder (older v1.5 but I like the way it compressed interlaced .. I think they made codec changes to the 2.0 version) and squeeze and more often that not find myself going to squeeze..I really like it - can't exactly explain why, but it's simple to use, gives a fair amount of control and has a good batch mode. but, I think it's more than express, so it depends on what you want to spend.

I use Cleaner XL and, whilst a bit cumbersome to get used to, allows very flexible encoding to lots of different formats at the same time. It seems to support all codecs installed on your machine... For a cheaper option, take a look at FFMPEG - it's command line driven but very flexible and supports most of the main formats...

Good Luck!