More > Media Center 17

Series & Movies

(1/2) > >>

darichman:
I've been reorganising my library a little bit lately - mainly to test and properly take advantage of Carnac, metadata lookup and some other video features which seem to be trickling their way into MC. I've always had a heavily customised library, with lots of user-generated fields etc to fit my workflow and media catalog.

One thing I realised a while ago was that I've never used the [Series] field. Firstly, because I had my own custom field for this long before it was added as a default field, and secondly because I use it for the titles of video works other than series.

Why do we need a stand-alone field limited to series, guys? I'm probably missing something, but doesn't this limit it's use to only... well, series? Why not call it [Title] or something similar so that it can be used with series, TV shows, comedy shows, theatre etc. Or would this be too ambiguous?

A generic title field for movies, for example, would allow us to use the name field for extras and special features etc without having all these files appear in your video views as separate 'movies'
[Title]=Titanic
[Name]=The Making of Titanic
(to me this should still belong to 'Titanic' not as a separate movie entity)

All this would really require would be changing the name of series to something which more broadly encompasses video titles.

To summarise the advantages of having a more generic title field as I see it:

* allowing mixed views of multiple video titles (series, miniseries, features, shorts, stage etc) through use of a single title field
* allowing use of the [Name] field for other things like special features, trailers etc
* you can tag music files (soundtracks), posters etc with the movie they belong to as well

rjm:
I'd like us to standardize on using Artist, Album, Name for all media types as follows:

Type: Artist, Album, Name

Movie: Series, Title, Part # or Extra
TV: Series, Season, Episode
Documentary: Producer, Title, Episode
Music: Artist, Album, Track
Audiobook: Author, Title, Chapter
eBook: Author, Title, null
Photo: Photographer, Topic, Image Name

This permits the construction of views that work for multiple media types, and eliminates media specific fields like Series and Title.

rick.ca:

--- Quote from: darichman on October 14, 2011, 09:54:00 pm ---All this would really require would be changing the name of series to something which more broadly encompasses video titles.
--- End quote ---

Why don't you just change the display name of [Series] to "Title"?


--- Quote from: rjm on October 14, 2011, 10:35:52 pm ---I'd like us to standardize on using Artist, Album, Name for all media types as follows...
This permits the construction of views that work for multiple media types, and eliminates media specific fields like Series and Title.

--- End quote ---

Although creating views for multiple media types would be a little easier, this is a minor benefit that wouldn't be of much interest to most users. It certainly doesn't outweigh the inconvenience of either having to get used to referring to (as just one example) series, season and episode as artist, album and name, or customizing the captions in every view so they make sense.

The fact there may be a similarity in the nature of the categories across media types doesn't mean that they're the same thing or there's any advantage to treating them as if they are. There is an advantage to using the same set of fields for different record types—if a significant number of values in each type actually refer to the same thing. This does happen when an "artist" is a person who has created different types of media in the same library. On the other hand, when music groups, movie series, TV series, documentary producers, authors and photographers are 99% mutually exclusive across media types, there's no significant data management advantage to be had.

There are significant disadvantages and risks to mixing them together as if they were the same. For the most part, these are minimized in an environment where only one media type is being worked with at a time, but will still be there in various forms. Suggested values in edit lists, for example, will include those from other media types—which are completely irrelevant for most editing situations and will therefore increase the risk of error. For that reason alone, it's more effective to keep music artists, authors and photographers separate. In the relatively rare cases the values are the same and they need to be brought together in the same view, this can done by joining the fields with an expression.

darichman:

--- Quote from: rick.ca on October 15, 2011, 12:48:45 am ---Why don't you just change the display name of [Series] to "Title"?

--- End quote ---

That's not a half bad idea ;D I will actually.
I'll just have to remember to reference 'Series' in any expressions/searches etc.
It just seems counter-productive to me.


--- Quote from: rjm on October 14, 2011, 10:35:52 pm ---I'd like us to standardize on using Artist, Album, Name for all media types as follows:

--- End quote ---

I can see what you're getting at, but this isn't quite what I had in mind... I do think that fields should appropriately describe what it is we're tagging, and agree with much of what rick posted.

rjm:
The focus of my library is non-fiction so having a common structure across all media types is very beneficial. I can see that if your library focus is pop culture then it does not matter.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page