Thank you very much Rick.
have to copy this and save it so I can take a look at it tonight.
I don't know how you intend to use this information, but Tutorials, Cinema 4D, Maxon Videos and Quick Tips can all be entered in separate existing or custom fields (e.g., [Genre], [Studio], [Medium], [Type]) for grouping, sorting, searching, etc.).
I really like your suggestion and it's following my same thought pattern.
If you don't already have something in mind, consider how you might use the People fields to maintain useful data related the videos. Your videos probably don't have actors, but they might have different people involved in some capacity. More likely, there are tools or techniques involved in their production you might want to keep track of. Then the database can answer questions like, "What videos did I use this technique in?"
I thought of using the People side of PVD too... because I do have some favorite tutorial hosts.
Some do have actors and I've been using the actor area to input them for now.
I've been using the Director slot for the Tutorial host at the moment.
I have added a couple custom area's to cover "Additionitional Plugin's" and "Additional softwares"
Been a long time since I played with trying to put something like this together and figuring out what should be included and the best way to catagorize things... pretty much trial and error for me right now. At least it is getting organized to some sor to of order on my drives as I am moving all my tutorials to another drive... labeling them - renaming them organizing them via App version etc etc. More work than I thought it would be but - it's coming along.
You probably already know you can create or modify an existing skin to suit this data. What's not so obvious is you can modify a language file to change the captions in the program to ones more appropriate for what you're using the program for. For an illustration, see Personal Anything Database?
Yeah- I saw that straight away - and one of the reasons I chose PVD over many other video DB's. The customization features I think will allow me to use PVD for my tutorials - as well as for regular movie db.
XML is pretty easy - I remember most of it from web design. And have some thoughts on a custom page for tuts. I will definitly check out that link you provided as a starting point.
The RegEX is new to me... has me a tad baffled at the moment trying to figure out what PVD is looking for via the expressions. I can make out part of them - as they are pretty obvious - but some parts I haven't a clue what they do yet. There's a link I remember in the help file for PVD that is to MS coding page - (i haven't been there yet[MS] - just thinking back to what it mentioned)
Once i have this figured out - problems should be solved. Of course I want to make changes to hopefully be as little work as possible from the default downloaded file names.
I'm all over the place right now - trying out different file and folder names / labels and symbols. Limiting my new HD to around 200 tuts till I can get the pattern and every thing figured out to where I can bring in my entire collection and of course - I'm downloading more all the time.
In the end I hope to share the DB with others... so they can add there own in but have a starting point with the one I'm creating.
I did try to run two seperate installs of PVD - renaming one to PTD (Personal Tutoral DB) and leaving the other as PVD 09 - Definitly did not work - crashed them both and I lost most all my data. lol
I did so to get seperate set of preference settings to stick per data base. PReferences I have for Movies and catagories obviously I don't need for the Tutorials.
What you suggested - helps a lot in figuring this all out.
I want to add also something like Basic - Beginner - Intermediate and Advanced catagories.
Preview movie of course. I kinda have that figured out - kinda... ;-) I've got it to play the preview first before starting the tutorial via scan every time...
Any help or suggestions on how to set it up - is 100% greatly appricated.
But from what I see - it's going to kick butt when done. I love it so far. Makes life so much easier just with what i have together thus far.
Fine tune this puppy - get all the settings right - nothing will touch it as far as a Tut data base.
I even got it to work with my PDF tutorials. Gotta love it!!!