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[lepa]

I have a view in TheaterView which list movies by actor. There are ~15000 actors in my database (imported from PVD/only actors of IMDB main page). Most of them are unknown side role actors and therefore useless in the TheaterView.

So the question is that is it possible to filter out all these not so important actors from the view?
For example by using a logic like "show only actors who have a role in more than a one movie"

[rick.ca]

So the question is that is it possible to filter out all these not so important actors from the view?

I don't think so. Remember that the actors are the criteria for filtering movies. Those that appear are always going to be the ones that exist in the movies currently selected. The essence of the problem is that when any actor you want to include is included, then all of the movies they appear in are included in the selection. Therefore, all of the other 14 actors in each of those movies are also included in the criteria. So even some means of restricting the actors (e.g., the top 100, your favourites, top credited) does not solve the problem.

The extent of the problem can be reduced, however. Most movies credit "stars" first. So a reasonable way to determine a set of known or popular actors is to create a list of the top three credited actors from each movie. I believe such a list—to be used as a criteria—has to be a static (manually created) rather than a dynamic (smart) list. That's fine. The result is unlikely to be noticeably different unless the collection changes radically. And this allow the list to be modified in various ways (e.g., populate the field for only top-rated movies).

So this is what I did:

     0. Reconfigured PvdImport to populate Actors with a simple list, rather than th optional Name/Role nested list.
     1. Create a list field named Starring.
     2. Selected movies rated higher than two stars.
     3. Manually populated Starring using =ListItem([Actors], 0); ListItem([Actors], 1); ListItem([Actors], 2)
     4. Replaced Actors with Starring in my Theatre View Credits views.

The result is a list of 1,300 actors. Still rather long, but much better than the original list of 9,300 actors.

Other credits (e.g., Director, Screenwriter, Composer) most often consist of just one person, so they don't pose the same problem. They can be restricted to those which are credited in more than one movie simply by including an "Only duplicates of..." modification in the Rules for file display for the view. Another method is to create a list of favourite or top items (e.g., directors) and use that to restrict the view. Do that by adding a "search list" to the view. For example, Director is any {my list}. The complimentary search is easily added by importing that search into a new one, and changing is any to is not any. So for Directors, my lists are "Top 60" and "The Rest."

These methods give me the following results for Directors...

     All: 528
     Duplicates only: 169
     Top 60: 62 (duplicates only: 57)
     The Rest: 468 (duplicates only: 112)

It's not very difficult, BTW, to export a list from PVD to Excel and create a list (e.g., directors credited in more than three movies) using the subtotal (count) function. But considering how easy it is to use "Only duplicates of...," I suppose you really have to care to bother making a list of favourites.

[Lasse_Lus]

wow rick 

i add my 2 cents..a shorter one 

create a detailed list (now called categories) grouped by actor add field [Track #] sort by totals and untick/untag those actors that are of no interest..

[rick.ca]

add field [Track #] sort by totals...

An interesting idea, but [Track #] can't be used for video files. And it doesn't seem to be any other integer field that can be used in the same way.

...and untick/untag those actors that are of no interest.

It would be the movies that would be untagged, so this would have the same limitation as the method I suggest—selecting one actor would include all the actors in the movies that actor appears in.

[Lasse_Lus]

the thing is rick, i know exactly what you are talking about, even though i maybe do it my way..but what you are saying is that adding tons of data needs administration and a plan..so everything is up to lepa

but to make a simple answer on a tricky question, what do you say about this instead, create view with actors in normal view with panes and sort by number of files (within the pane) (you will see the totals in the statusbar), then create some "nested" actorgroups like "misc." or "others" and drag the actors at the end of the pane to that, does that work ?

[leezer3]

An interesting idea, but [Track #] can't be used for video files. And it doesn't seem to be any other integer field that can be used in the same way.

It would be the movies that would be untagged, so this would have the same limitation as the method I suggest—selecting one actor would include all the actors in the movies that actor appears in.

Oddly enough it can, it's just never visible, which I'd agree needs changing.
You can either move/ copy into it, or use the fill from list order tools

-Leezer-

[lepa]

Thanks for the tips everybody!
I didn't think that it would be possible to do this just perfectly but thought that it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Lasse:
By "nesting" do you mean that I'll just make new actor tag "Others" and all these "nobody" actor tags will be changed to "Others"? So I'll lose all these actors from the database completely. It would still be kind of acceptable as I could revive the tags from PVD anytime I want. By removing on hit wonders I would get: 15000 --> 3000

Top3 Starring solution would result ~2900 actors but would left out many known actors.
Top6 Would show ~8000 if I remember correctly

One option could be using wikipedia search for actor field as wikipedia only lists notable actors

[Lasse_Lus]

Lasse:
By "nesting" do you mean that I'll just make new actor tag "Others" and all these "nobody" actor tags will be changed to "Others"? So I'll lose all these actors from the database completely.

lepa, nope..i thought you could make nesting like nobody\actor 1 nobody\actor 2 etc..
so you end up with actors belonging to several movies and (one) a group with "nobody"\nested actors

..or you make several groups based as hiarchy..

make a backup then try it out  you can also undo the last change

so something like this

1) sort the files as metioned earlier
2) create one new tag called "nobody"
3)

mark the tags at the bottom of the pane as below


drag those into "nobody"

done (hopefully)

[lepa]

Thanks, worked like a charm 

[rick.ca]

I finally figured out how to group by Actors and sort them by number of files. I suppose I'm too used to using my favoured Panes views. It's rather straightforward to do so by creating a Categories view from scratch.

This made me think maybe I was missing something in the Theatre View configuration. I was. It's possible to sort a category by number of files there as well. I missed it because I was looking in the wrong place—Rules for file display—instead of Editing the properties of the category in the Details panel. That's a little difficult to follow, so I've attached a screen shot.

This is still not a perfect solution, but sorting by number of files is obviously very effective in removing the "no-name" actors from the top of the list. This makes it okay for browsing, while not so okay for finding a specific person. The view can still be configured so any actor can be found alphabetically. I'll explain what I've done—otherwise, the screen shot might seem strange...Following are the "categories" in my Actors view:

Actors: Search lists—"Top 90" and "The rest"—as explained above.
Actors: Actors field, ascending.
Actors: Actors field, by number of files.
People: People field, which is populated with a nested list of all credits (and in the case of actors, includes their role).

At the top of each of the first three levels of this view, the first group will be "All Actors." This can be used the bypass any of these levels so only the desired one is used. I add the nested People field to the end of all my Credits views. The purpose of this is to show the other people the selected person has been credited with. This list will also include the person already selected. Far from being redundant, this will show first the different credit types (i.e., Producer, Screenwriter, Director, Actor, Composer) and then, for Actor, the role the selected person played in each of the movies.

Using two methods (search lists and sorting) seems like overkill. But I think I'll probably still appreciate the ability to select "notable" people using a list, and then browse that list alphabetically.

i thought you could make nesting like nobody\actor 1 nobody\actor 2 etc...

I'm having trouble keeping up.

I didn't understand this at first, but now I do. Using "pane tagging," I added all the actors with less than three movies to "Minor." Yes, that works very well. I can do away with my search lists, and use the field view directly. This, of course, will mess up other things—like the display of actors in my information pane—by I suppose that can be fixed using an expression... [Edit] Oops. Should have quit while I was ahead. The original actor data is in credits order. Making any changes (like nesting the "minor" actors) causes the names to be reordered alphabetically. That's worse than the problem I was trying to solve.

This is turning out to be a lot of work for one simple question!