Oscar 2008 nominations revealed

Best Picture
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Best Director
Julian Schnabel - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman - Juno
Tony Gilroy - Michael Clayton
Joel and Ethan Coen - No Country for Old Men
Paul Thomas Anderson - There Will Be Blood

Best Actor
George Clooney - Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp - Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones - In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen - Eastern Promises

Best Actress
Cate Blanchett - Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie - Away from Her
Marion Cotillard - La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney - The Savages
Ellen Page - Juno

Best Supporting Actor
Casey Affleck - The Assassination of Jesse James...
Javier Bardem - No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook - Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson - Michael Clayton

Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett - I'm Not There
Ruby Dee - American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan - Atonement
Amy Ryan - Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton - Michael Clayton

Best Foreign Language Film
Beaufort (Israel)
The Counterfeiters (Austria)
Katyn (Poland)
Mongol (Kazakhstan)
12 (Russia)

Best Animated Feature
Persepolis
Ratatouille
Surf's Up

Best Adapted Screenplay
Atonement
Away from Her
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Best Original Screenplay
Juno
Lars and the Real Girl
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
The Savages

Best Music (Score)
Atonement
The Kite Runner
Michael Clayton
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma

Best Music (Song)
Falling Slowly - Once (performed by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova)
Happy Working Song - Enchanted (performed by Amy Adams)
Raise It Up - August Rush (performed by Jamia Simone Nash and Impact Repertory Theatre)
So Close - Enchanted (performed by Jon McLaughlin)
That's How You Know - Enchanted (performed by Amy Adams)

Best Documentary Feature
No End in Sight
Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
Sicko
Taxi to the Dark Side
War/Dance

Best Documentary Short
Freeheld
La Corona (The Crown)
Salim Baba
Sari's Mother

Best Visual Effects
The Golden Compass
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
Transformers

Best Cinematography
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Atonement
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Best Art Direction
American Gangster
Atonement
The Golden Compass
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
There Will Be Blood

Best Animated Short
I Met the Walrus
Madame Tutli-Putli
Meme Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)
My Love (Moya Lyubov)
Peter & the Wolf

Best Short Film
At Night
Il Supplente
Le Mozart des Pickpockets
Tanghi Argentini
The Tonto Woman

Best Costume Design
Across the Universe
Atonement
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
La Vie en Rose
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Best Make-Up
La Vie en Rose
Norbit
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Best Sound Mixing
The Bourne Ultimatum
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
3:10 to Yuma
Transformers

Best Sound Editing
The Bourne Ultimatum
No Country for Old Men
Ratatouille
There Will Be Blood
Transformers

Best Film Editing
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Into the Wild
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

The ceremony takes place on February 24th. The producer has promised that the "show will go on" whether the actors are there or not, unlike the Golden Globes.

FCS Remover - Easily uninstall Final Cut Studio

By popular demand, we've just created a new tool on the site that allows you to uninstall Final Cut Studio. One of the Mac's biggest failings is the lack of software uninstallation options. In order to remove an application, you must delete the program from Applications and then trawl through the Library folders and delete all related files. This is tedious and there is a real risk of accidentally deleting something that shouldn't be deleted.

With Final Cut Studio, the problem is particularly apparent because recently, many users have discovered hardware and software compatibility problems with the latest versions. They wish to downgrade to a previous version but they cannot install a previous version unless the latest version is removed. Simply deleting the Final Cut Pro application in the Applications folder doesn't work.

FCS Remover automates this process, moving Final Cut Studio applications and support files to your Trash without disturbing your documents. It is better than general purpose third-party uninstallers because it is designed specifically for Final Cut Studio and so you can be certain that it is not automatically removing files it should not. For safety, it moves your files to the Trash rather than deleting them outright so you can see exactly what has been moved before you click "Empty".

FCS Remover is a free download for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard. We would appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

A little update on Final Cut Pro's gamma quirks

Last week I made a post about Final Cut Pro modifying the gamma of clips, causing some to be too dark and some to be washed out.

The washed out issue was the most serious because it only happened upon exporting the movie, and the image looked perfectly fine in FCP. The darkening issue was less severe because it only affected the user's perception of the image in FCP and if they were not performing color correction in FCP, they would be perfectly fine.

I was just going through User Preferences, trying to help someone who was having difficulty, when I noticed a new option that I had never seen before (I don't adjust user prefs very often). In the Editing tab, there is a section marked "Imported Still / RGB Video Gamma". You can choose from Source, 1.80, 2.20, 2.22 and Custom. My research indicates that this option has been there since 6.0.0 but Apple recently renamed it in 6.0.2 to clarify that it is for RGB footage only.

1.80 refers to the default gamma of RGB footage (eg. still images and special effects codecs such as Animation). This is also the default gamma of your Mac display. 2.20 refers to the default gamma of YUV footage (eg. NTSC, PAL, ProRes, etc). Camera footage falls into this category, as do a lot of the displays on Windows machines. Gamma 2.22 is also used by Windows PCs. I would advise leaving this option on Source, so that no gamma correction will be applied to the clip itself. The only correction that will occur will be when playing back in the FCP Canvas, and not upon exporting the movie.

This setting will fix the RGB gamma issue that caused images to be washed out upon export. This does not change Final Cut Pro's handling of YUV images.

Missing codecs in QuickTime 7.4

[Time code]; has noticed that the new QuickTime 7.4 update offers you significantly fewer export options than its predecessor. At first glance, they appear to have been removed, but rest assured - they are still there and have just been hidden. To show them again, go to QuickTime in System Preferences, click on the Advanced tab and check the box marked "Show legacy encoders".

The reason for hiding them is probably to prevent end-user confusion and promote more modern formats.

Update: Apple now has a support document confirming this.

QuickTime 7.4 causes issues with After Effects

After some users found problems with QuickTime 7.3, some are reporting issues with 7.4 as well.

The QT 7.3 update broke non-current versions of Final Cut Pro, causing log and capture dropouts among other things. If you were hoping the latest update fixes the problems caused by the previous patch, I'm afraid you are out of luck. You will need to downgrade to QT 7.2.

Additionally, After Effects users are reporting that version 7.4 is causing rendering issues for them. They are finding that AE will stop rendering after exactly 10 minutes with the message "After Effects error: opening movie - you do not have permission to open this file (-54)". The only solution so far is to downgrade back to QT 7.2 or 7.3.1 or wait for Adobe or Apple to issue a patch. Windows users have been reporting these issues as well, and the issue seems to affect widespread versions of AE.

There is a post on Apple's support boards that gives a way of "hacking" QuickTime back to 7.2 by installing 7.3 or 7.4 and then copying over the old 7.2 files. This is a quick and dirty way of doing it but I would not advise it. Final Cut Pro is a professional and complex application and for best results, I recommend backing up your files and performing a complete Erase and Install. This creates the most stable environment for running the software. You do not want it to fail at an important moment, particularly if you make your living from using it. Remember not to reinstall QuickTime 7.4 again afterwards!

Always remember the Golden Rule: Don't install updates on a production machine unless you have a way of quickly getting everything back to normal (such as a clone), and DEFINITELY don't install anything in the middle of a project.

Update: Some After Effects users are coping by rendering out their sequences in 10 minute segments, putting them together in Final Cut Pro and then exporting them as one movie clip. Obviously this significantly increases the total rendering time and you should make allowances for the extra time burden.

Update #2: Apparently, this issue also affects Cinema 4D and is related to an update in QuickTime's Digital Rights Management (DRM) code. Presumably this is a conflict with code designed to prevent people from copying or distributing iTunes-rented movies.

Footage Calc updates

Our online tool for calculating the disk space requirements of various video codecs has just been updated. It now supports the following file formats and codecs:

* AJA KONA 10-bit RGB
* AJA 2Vuy
* Cineon
* Maya IFF format
* MPEG-2 at 6.2Mbps, 5.0Mbps and 3.7Mbps fixed bit rate
* OpenEXR
* SGI
* SGI Raw
* Softimage format
* Uncompressed Targa images (TGA)
* Uncompressed TIFF images

Footage Calc
Footage Calc (iPhone version)

These additions are all based on user feedback. Use the feedback link at the bottom of every page to tell us your likes, dislikes, bug reports and suggestions.

Contact form issues fixed

It was recently brought to my attention that we've been having some technical issues with the contact form lately. I was a bit surprised by this as I had only recently fixed it. It turned out that the version on the server was accidentally replaced with the old one when the site was redesigned.

I apologize for any inconvenience caused. This has now been fixed and I see no technical reason as to why it should go down again.

Macworld 2008 Keynote

Here's what Santa Steve has in store for us:

* New Airport Extreme with built-in storage, called "Time Capsule". It's designed for Time Machine, so that laptop users don't have to keep plugging in external hard drives. Backup is better automated, as users will always forget or just be lazy. Two options: 500 GB for $299 and 1 TB for $499. It will ship in February.

* New iPhone features - Maps with locations (it triangulates both cell towers and wi-fi points), webclips, customizable home screens (up to 9 separate screens), SMS multiple people at once, chapters, subtitles, and language support in video, and lyrics support in audio. This is all via the 1.1.3 firmware update that was previously leaked, and it is out today for free.

* New iPod touch features - Now features Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather, that were previously featured exclusively on the iPhone. The update is $20 for existing users but included in the price of new units. The charge is probably partly due to potentially cannibalizing iPhone sales and partly due to accounting (they're not allowed to add major new features later on for free).

* iTunes Movie Rentals - They have Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, New Line, Lionsgate, Fox, Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Sony on board. New rentals come out 30 days after DVD releases, and they will have 1000 in the library by the end of February. You have 30 days to begin watching it and you must finish it within 24 hours once you've started. You can rent in both HD and SD quality. For HD: $3.99 for older titles, $4.99 for new releases. SD titles are $1 less. There will be software updates today to enable this functionality.

* Apple TV has a brand new UI. You can rent directly from your couch, using an on-screen keyboard to type things in. You can also get podcasts and music videos. It also has .Mac and Flickr support, allowing you to view friends' photo albums. All of this software will be enabled via a free software upgrade in the next two weeks. They're also knocking $70 off the price. You also no longer require a computer in order to use it.

* They now have a deal with Fox where all new Fox Blu-ray titles will have an iTunes-compatible version on the disc designed for iPod users.

* MacBook Air - "The world's thinnest notebook". It has a 13.3" widescreen LED display (not LCD) and is 0.16 inches at its thinnest end and 0.76 at its thickest. It weighs 3lbs. Steve even whipped out an envelope on stage and fitted it inside! It's aluminum with a backlit black full-size keyboard and trackpad. The trackpad supports advanced gestures (a la the iPhone), allowing you to perform extra application functions without needing the keyboard. It also comes with an iSight camera. 80 GB hard drive as standard or you can opt for a 64 GB solid-state flash drive (much faster but considerably more expensive). 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 1.8 GHz available as an option. It turns out that the processor inside is specifically made for the Air, and has been shrunk by 60% at Apple's request.

It does not come with a CD or DVD drive but there is an external one for $99 that is specifically designed for it. Apple has also created software called Remote Disc that allows you to browse other machines' optical drives via wi-fi and install software using their optical drives. You can do this with both Mac and PC machines.

It also has 5 hours of battery life when you browse the web with Wi-fi switched on. The price is $1799 and it will ship in two weeks. Pre-orders available now. It is also more eco-friendly than its predecessors, using less packaging and no mercury, arsenic, BFR or PVC.

Analysis
Ok, ok, I was wrong with my prediction of no sub-notebook. But it's good to see that Apple has dealt with the potential issues I brought up. This is a great machine for those that need something small and light without compromising power.

My favorite announcement today was iTunes movie rentals and how Apple has integrated these with the Apple TV. Steve acknowledged that the Apple TV had missed the mark somewhat, and that movies are the main driving point. I was expecting movie rentals but I was not expecting HD support as well. I was considering signing up for a Netflix account but this deal is much better. You can rent HD movies that will work on Macs, PCs, the Apple TV, iPods and iPhones for a relatively low fee. No other online rental company offers this. It is also considerably more convenient than sending and receiving discs in the mail.

I am also considering buying an Apple TV now. The device has considerably more use to me now that you can rent and watch HD movies directly from the comfort of your sofa. There is no word on whether purchased movies will be offered in HD as well, or even if they will continue to be offered at all. I will probably hold off purchasing it just yet though, as I am sure that Apple will put a DVD drive in it once a format "wins" the war. I may as well get one unit that does everything instead of 3 or 4, all with different remotes.

Steve mentioned the SDK briefly but did not really go into detail about it, which surprised me. And no 16 GB iPhone or new MacBook Pros either. I was certain they were going to be there. Maybe Apple will just do a minor update to the 'Pros without fanfare later in the year. Steve said that there were a lot of things coming in two weeks but that "there are another 50" afterwards, implying that the announcements are far from over. No new cinema displays and no mention of the Mac Mini either. Some rumor sites have been saying for years that the Mini is about to be killed off but it seems to be the one thing that no-one ever talks about. I think if Steve were to kill it, he would have something better to immediately replace it.

So, in summary, a pretty good keynote. I don't think the stock will jump as high as it did with the iPhone announcement last year but I think this will go down well with investors.

Update: Apple's site has more details on everything announced at the keynote. Also check Software Update because iTunes 7.6 and QuickTime 7.4 are already available for download (at least for me - sometimes they stagger updates across geographic locations). Do not install these on your production machine! Be especially wary of QuickTime 7.4 if you do not have an up-to-date version of Final Cut Pro.

Update 2: View the keynote video online.

Also, Blockbuster and Netflix shares dropped significantly after the keynote. Surprisingly, so did Apple's. It turns out that people were somewhat disappointed with today's keynote. The Macbook Air is a well-designed machine but the price is somewhat prohibitive, which is a shame. If you choose the solid-state drive, it takes the price to over $3000. The price per GB of solid-state memory is falling significantly every year so it would not make sense to spend that much on the solid-state version right now.

Is your Final Cut Pro sequence too dark or washed out?

This seems to be a common question. Sometimes people will create a sequence in Shake (or similar) and export to Final Cut, only to find that the image is much darker in FCP. Others have a different problem - it displays fine in FCP but appears washed out when you export it.

Final Cut Pro tends to make assumptions when it comes to gamma. If you create YUV (e.g. DV PAL, NTSC) footage, it will assume that it was created with a gamma of 2.2, which it would have been if it had been shot in a camera. Final Cut therefore lowers the gamma in order to mimic what it would look like on a broadcast monitor, resulting in a darkening of the image.

Note that the image is only dark in Final Cut Pro and if you export it, it will export with the correct gamma. However, the mistake that some people make is to brighten the image in Final Cut, leading to it being too bright upon exporting.

Applications like Shake do not make any modifications to the display of the gamma so if it looks fine in Shake, it will look fine upon exporting, no matter what Final Cut Pro is showing on the screen. This is assuming your monitor is correctly calibrated, of course.

When you import RGB elements (such as the Apple Animation codec or still images) into a YUV sequence, the opposite problem occurs. Final Cut Pro will assume they were created with a gamma of 1.8. Final Cut will then increase the gamma to 2.2 (the gamma value that FCP assumes all YUV media is created at) to compensate for this.

The image is now considered YUV, so when it plays back, Final Cut will lower the gamma again to compensate, as it does with all YUV footage. The RGB elements will be displayed on the screen at their correct gamma but when you export the sequence, the boosted gamma will be used and the exported sequence will be too bright.

The solution is to convert the files to YUV before adding them to your Final Cut Pro project. For footage, convert to Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 or Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 to ensure that no data will be lost in the conversion process. If the file sizes for this are too large, try a high quality lossy codec such as Apple ProRes.

For images, the easiest method is to convert them to a single-frame QuickTime file with a YUV codec such as DV NTSC. It is better to perform this task with Compressor rather than QuickTime.

Tool updates

We've updated some of our online tools to reflect the feedback we've been receiving from you.

Footage Calc
* Slightly improved loading speed of mobile version.
* Support for Uncompressed 720p and 1080p 4:2:2 at 8-bit and 10-bit
* Improved accuracy of AVID PAL 2:1 Best

Film Rate Calc
* Slightly improved loading speed of mobile version.

Aspect Ratio Calc
* Slightly improved loading speed of mobile version.
* Changes you make in one dialog transfer across to the others. For example, if you type 1280x720 into the Res box in the Aspect Ratio dialog and then switch to Height, the width and aspect ratio in the new dialog will reflect the previous calculation.
* Extra statistics - you can now view the unrounded aspect ratio, and round width and height calculations to the nearest 16th.

Remember that we always appreciate your feedback and are committed to providing a genuinely useful service. Just click the feedback link at the bottom of the page and leave your thoughts.