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[cgroth]

Hi,

I use MC18 in Theatre View. For Movies I would like to be able to have more than one file appear when selecting the Movie Cover, e.g. Movie and Bonus Material or Theatrical Version and Director's Cut. This would be a little like selecting Seasons and sub-units of Series (for TV Shows) or Episodes/Discs as sub-units of Seasons (Series > TV Shows). Is that possible, and if so, how?

Chris

[MrC]

Sure, you just have to customize Theater View's Video > Movies area, adding a new category for drill down.  Take a look at how the Shows branch is configured.

[cgroth]

Sure, you just have to customize Theater View's Video > Movies area, adding a new category for drill down.  Take a look at how the Shows branch is configured.

OK, I have started looking into that type of structure. My initial problem (I think) is probably in the way Movies are imported? Although I have done no customization to the importing process, other than to place my Videos in folders called Movies and Showns, and then set import to apply Media Sub Type tags accordingly, it seems that MC18 treats these differently. Movies have names only, whereas Shows have Series, Season and either Discs or Episodes. I know some of this information comes from Library Tools > Fill Properties From Filename. How the rest of the info is extracted and processed I am not certain. So I am not clear on the logical steps between structuring my files prior to import and how this structure can be used to present a movie along these lines:

Video > Movie > Name > Another Day In Paradise > Theatrical Release/Director's Cut (where each of Theatrical Release and Director's Cut would be selectable/playable).

The file structure I have for my content (ripped discs) is like this:

NAS\Video\Movies\Movie Title and the two subfolders: Movie and Bonus, or Theatrical and Director's Cut, or Full Frame and Widescreen. Some movies, like Dances With Wolves. Pearl Harbour and Lord of The Ring actually have two or more ripped discs for a single movie.
So I guess I need MC to check whether there is more than one folder in a movie folder, and if so treat the movie as if it were a Series, with only one season, but with two or more episodes/discs, and then name each of the instances according to the name of the folder? If so, am I correct in assuming that this issue needs to be addressed first from an import (or library tools) perspective, in order to get the necessary information and structure visible in Standard View, before I start playing around with how the info is shown in theatre View?

Best
Chris

[MrC]

MC's auto-import rules and Carnac help cull metadata from both the file's name and path, and also online lookups.  The rules are a little too complicated to present here, and there is some undocumented magic that you'll just have to learn over time.

If you use well-known folder paths, and file names (as per usage in other programs such as Sage, etc.), most of the time, things will just work.

But many users have create their own folder hierarchy and file name semantics; in these cases, use auto-import rules to automatically grab the relevant pieces to stuff into the appropriate fields.

For your sub-folders "Movie and Bonus", etc. you can create some expressions (and test them in Std View), to parse the Filename or Filename (path) fields, and have them output what you want.  You'll use these values to assign one or more fields in your auto-import rules.  So consider the values you want and the fields you want assigned (e.g. Keywords: Bonus; Director's Cut).

Ask for specific help if you need it.

[cgroth]

OK, it seems my thinking might not be too far off, so I'll experiment. So far I am not yet at a stage where I can ask meaningful specific questions (although we have a saying in Norwegian: One idiot can ask more questions than 10 geniuses can answer...)

MC18 is now working pretty much perfectly for me, so I am just starting to fiddle with the niceties of presentation. The flexibility and range of capabilities of this software is fantastic 

[cgroth]

MC's auto-import rules and Carnac help cull metadata from both the file's name and path, and also online lookups.  The rules are a little too complicated to present here, and there is some undocumented magic that you'll just have to learn over time.

If you use well-known folder paths, and file names (as per usage in other programs such as Sage, etc.), most of the time, things will just work.

But many users have create their own folder hierarchy and file name semantics; in these cases, use auto-import rules to automatically grab the relevant pieces to stuff into the appropriate fields.

For your sub-folders "Movie and Bonus", etc. you can create some expressions (and test them in Std View), to parse the Filename or Filename (path) fields, and have them output what you want.  You'll use these values to assign one or more fields in your auto-import rules.  So consider the values you want and the fields you want assigned (e.g. Keywords: Bonus; Director's Cut).

Ask for specific help if you need it.

Dear MrC,

I assume that after some experimentation with expressions in standard view I will be able to isolate the information I want to display in Theatre View and which also tells the external player (TMT6) which file to play. The information is found in the filename (path) and I can probably isolate it in an expression called DiscName for example. However, what I haven't figured out is how to make Theatre View > Video > Movie check to see if there is more than one folder in a Movie file, and if so, to behave more like as if it were a TV Show with more than one file to be selected and played. I have tried to look at how this is handled in Tools > Theatre View > Items To Show > Shows, but this is done by adding Series and the Seasons. These are library fields, which I guess may be seen as a type of predefined default expression that MC18 inutitively understands. How can I get my expression DiscName to be sub-units of Movies in the way that Series and Seasons is, and get MC18 to behave accordingly?

You may not think this is a request for specific help, but I am afraid that because there is a hole in my understanding of the logic that combines the file information I can manage to create/structure in standard view and the information I show in Theatre View, I am unable to be more specific. I need to understand how one is linked to the other.

Thanks for your patience 

Chris

[MrC]

I'll admit upfront I'm having trouble visualizing and recalling your configuration and how you've setup your system.  So I'll provide a general answer, which hopefully with guide you forward.

For each of the Items To Show in Theater View (and we'll focus on just Video), there is a cascading sequence of configurations, such as Video > Shows > Series.   The top-level items just selects the types of files that will be displayed in the view (the query).  For Shows, it is Media Sub Type = TV Show.

But at the those bottom-level ltems, such as Series, there is one or more Details items.  And these items tell MC how to group the resulting files (from the query).  For Series, it is Series and Season.  These are just MC fields, values you set (or MC auto-set), to distinguish one file from the next.  MC collects all the like items at each of those levels (Series and Season) and presents them as groupings for you to select and drill down into.

So the question is... what "thing" do you want to use to cause a grouping?   If the data is already in an MC field, you can add that field name somewhere under Details.  Or, it could be an expression that calculates some value for each file (such as part of the file name or its path), and so an expression category can be added under Details.

Stated another way, if you select one file, and look at all the metadata for that file in the Tag Action Window (showing all values), which field, or part of which field, do you want to grab and use as the basis for creating some grouping?

[cgroth]

I'll admit upfront I'm having trouble visualizing and recalling your configuration and how you've setup your system.  So I'll provide a general answer, which hopefully with guide you forward.

For each of the Items To Show in Theater View (and we'll focus on just Video), there is a cascading sequence of configurations, such as Video > Shows > Series.   The top-level items just selects the types of files that will be displayed in the view (the query).  For Shows, it is Media Sub Type = TV Show.

But at the those bottom-level ltems, such as Series, there is one or more Details items.  And these items tell MC how to group the resulting files (from the query).  For Series, it is Series and Season.  These are just MC fields, values you set (or MC auto-set), to distinguish one file from the next.  MC collects all the like items at each of those levels (Series and Season) and presents them as groupings for you to select and drill down into.

So the question is... what "thing" do you want to use to cause a grouping?   If the data is already in an MC field, you can add that field name somewhere under Details.  Or, it could be an expression that calculates some value for each file (such as part of the file name or its path), and so an expression category can be added under Details.

Stated another way, if you select one file, and look at all the metadata for that file in the Tag Action Window (showing all values), which field, or part of which field, do you want to grab and use as the basis for creating some grouping?

Thanks MrC, I think you are pointing me in the right direction, the answer might have something to do with tags. I'll examine them more closely. I haven't used them for anything (at least directly) so far.

What I think I have worked out is that the Name field that is shown in Standard view (and in Theatre View), does not come from the filename, but from the info in the Sidecar file inside the folders with the movies. And the info in the Sidecar file is placed there my some mysterious/secret functionality called Carnac, which I understand the users cannot manipulate? So, if I want to control the the name of the Movie (for example Another Perfect Day in Paradise), and the name of the "discs" (that's still how I think of the playable files, since they are ripped DVDs), for example Theatrical Release and Director's Cut, then I name the folders accordingly and extract that info using expressions. Then, instead of displaying the [Name] and can display my own creation DiscName?

I will try to work out which tags should trigger MC to act as if a Movie where a Show, but at this stage I can say that due to the way Carnac appears to work, when I have a Movie in a single file, with two sub-files (as just described above), then these two subfiles are imported separately as different movies, and the tags are therefore probably in two sets, each referring to a single disc. What I need to do is find a way to treat two "discs" (i.e. subfolders) as two subunits of the same movie, and therefore have one set of tags that says that for one movie, two choices should be available (or more than two if that is the case, or rare occasions).

[MrC]

Regarding Carnac, tags, and import.

When MC imports a file through auto-import, it both tries to deduce metadata from the path and file name.  But for situations like yours, where you have your folders in a more customized structure, MC cannot deduce this.  So it either guesses incorrectly, and hence your Name, Series, etc. values will be incorrect, or they will be empty.

So for custom cases like yours, you'll need to help MC pull this information with custom auto-import rules.  You construct rules that take the fields it does know about during the import (such as Filename) and break it appear, grabbing the pieces you need to stuff into MC fields.  We discussed this back when you started.

So you need to identify the components of your path, and decide which fields will be populated with those pieces.  Making this work requires writing the expressions, testing them in some view using an expression column, and when you're grabbing the right pieces, create auto-import rules to fill the fields with your values.

[cgroth]

Dear MrC, I will start working on the expressions right away. Meanwhile, I would love your comment on whether my thinking is sound:

In the attached screengrab 1 you can see my file structure. The Movie in marked in red, the discs in blue. This is reflected in the imported movie in MC, see screengrab 2. What you can also see in screengrab 2 is that the two "discs" are imported as separate movies.

So I thought I'd begin with some nomenclature; I'd create an expression that extracted a value/info that I'd call MovieName, in this case Another Day In Paradise, which would be found in the Filename (path) field, just after /Movie/. Then I'd create a value/info called DiscName, of which there can be more than one for a given MovieName, in this case Director's Cut and Theatrical Release.  These can be found in the Filename (path) after the /Movie/MovieName/ fields.

Does this make sense as a way of structuring my files and setting up expressions?

Thanks again for all your support, I would be lost without it!

[MrC]

That seems fine if you have many multi-release versions of movies.

I'd call your DiscName instead Release Version, and make it a list-type field so that it acts like the current Keywords.  That way, when you tag, you can just check the appropriate version tags (Director's Cut, Special Edition).  Changing the name also eliminates the tie in to the physical media (imagine next year when you start purchasing movies strictly via download, and no longer use physical discs).  If you want to track the media type, use a Media Form field or something like that.

It will be easy enough to grab your movie names from your path, since the name always follows Video\Movies\, and likewise your release version.  Ask if you need/want help here.

Also, your Name column in the screenshot.  You can make that a collapsable Tree like view, so that your Another Day In Paradise will show as one entry which can be expanded:

    > Another Day In Paradise
          Director's Cut
          Theatrical Release

This will reduce the length of the list, and allow you to expand into your versions only when you need to.