08 February 2008

Skandies: #9



Picture: Regular Lovers (101/8)
Director: Paul Greengrass, The Bourne Ultimatum (90/12)
Actress: Laura Linney, The Savages (161/16)
Actor: Gordon Pinsent, Away From Her (100/10)
S. Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, No Country for Old Men (96/10)
S. Actress: Charlotte Gainsbourg, I'm Not There (84/7)
Screenplay: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others (119/12)
Scene: Derrick explosion, There Will Be Blood (82/7)

[I don't know why YouTube always squeezes 2.35:1 rather than retaining the original aspect ratio.]



HISTORY:

Greengrass placed 3rd last year for United 93.

2000 Best Actress winner Linney (You Can Count on Me) makes her seventh career appearance in the top 20. The other five (all but one in Supporting): 8th for The Truman Show (1998), 6th for The House of Mirth (2000), 13th (lead) for p.s. (2004), 18th for Kinsey (2004), and 3rd for The Squid and the Whale (2005). Jones got his first nod just a week or so ago for In the Valley of Elah. Gainsbourg makes it two years in a row, having placed 14th for 2006's The Science of Sleep. Pinsent is new, as is FHvD.

6 comments:

dd said...

YouTube is automatically expanding everything to a 4x3 ratio, and you're probably (I assume) sending an anamorphic 16x9 clip. The way to fix this, I assume, would be to use an editing program to embed the anamorphic 2.35:1 clip into a standard 4x3 clip so that YouTube didn't squeeze it. If you have Avid or Final Cut Pro access, I can give you more details on how to do that, if you care.

(Apparently some anamorphic 1.78/85:1 stuff is correctly reformatting when uploaded to YouTube, so it may have to do with YouTube preparsing the video content, behavior differing if it finds images or black bars.)

md'a said...

Thanks, but I don't have either app. I do have iMovie.

dd said...

Lemme crack open iMovie and see what I can figure out, I've barely used it and get very frustrated with it. (It's kind of like editing with boxing gloves on.)

Alternately, if they're not big files (New Zealand broadband is relatively narrow) and you don't mind breaking the Skandies Veil of Secrecy, I've got a little time this weekend where I could convert those that need to be squeezed.

dd said...

Okay, this looks dead easy in iMovie.

1. Open a new project. (Make sure you're at DV-NTSC setting.)
2. Drag your clip into iMovie. It should create a clip on the side.
3. Drag the clip down to the timeline at the bottom.
4. Use the clock icon to select the Timeline (it's in the lower left, below the display window, above the timeline, and next to an icon that's a movie frame).
5. Go to File - Share - QuickTime, and save it as a QuickTime movie. If you want to fuck with the details for the export, choose expert. Otherwise it'll export a 720x486 clip in the 4x3 ratio.

On the test clip, it appears that it did a bit of crunching (reducing the vertical aspect slightly), but it's substantially less objectionable than the stretching you're getting now. The only test clip I had handy didn't have black bars on it, though, which might be an unexpected variable. But give it a go.

(Note that the latest version of iMovie, which I'm not using, has been completely rearchitected, so none of this, may apply.)

Steve C. said...

Pinsent finished ahead of Christie. Good job getting it right unlike everyone else in the world, Skandie voters.

Unknown said...

Good job Garrel and Gainsbourg. Vive la France!