Posted by: AimHere
« on: August 20, 2013, 02:49:39 am »I'm curious...
With this number of people, you're obviously not using the option to Show people added from movie credits. They're initially being added as invisible records, then you're doing something to make the ones you're interested in visible. With 1,759 movies, there's likely in the order of 30,000 people in your database—many more if you're not restricting the number downloaded (e.g., actors from main page only).
So I'm wondering if you have any routine for making the people you're interested in visible and downloading their information. I understand this might be simply clicking on people in Movie view if and when you're interested in them. This will make the one selected visible, and switch you to People view where it would only take a few seconds (hopefully) to download their information. In other words, they could be added on an "as needed" basis. On the other hand, you might use some systematic approach, like adding the director and "starring" actors each time you add a movie.
I use the other approach of using the option to Show people added from movie credits, and then regularly downloading information for all the people added since my last update. I'd like to eventually provide a description of both alternatives and their pros and cons in the Help Documentation. And you might convince me I should switch to your method. I find the people I'm really interested in tend to get lost in a sea of 33,000 people.
Just now realized you were talking to me, LOL. (The quoted number of movies was my first clue
)Actually, I DO use "Show people added from movie credits". So, all of the actors credited in the titles I'm adding ARE visible in People View. If you're wondering why there aren't more people in my database, it's probably because the pool of actors working in the genres I'm tracking with this database simply isn't very large... but many of them are very prolific, appearing in hundreds of titles. And most of the movies only credit a handful of actors, so there are usually less than half a dozen added per title, tops.
My typical workflow goes something like this:
- Add a movie with new movie master OR auto-scan inserted DVDs (I burn all my movies onto DVD-Rs, up to six per disc, prior to importing into PVD).
- PVD automatically imports movie info (including the list of cast members) from the Web.
- PVD also automatically adds the credited actors to my People View (due to "Show people added from movie credits"), if they weren't already present.
- I click on each actor in the Movie record to make sure they were added correctly to People View. In some cases they are added under the wrong name or alias, and I have to correct it. (This part is a bit of a pain, as "correcting" means going back to Movie View and editing the Actors list to reflect the correct name so the movie's title gets moved to the correct People record's filmography.)
- I prefer to maintain a semi-complete filmography (even movies I don't have) for every actor, so I use my web browser to search on IMDB for each NEW actor to see if the website has a record of them, and if so, copy the URL to PVD's People-View "URL" field. Then I do an import to get the filmography. I could just import without checking IMDB in my web browser first, but then I run the risk that the wrong actor might be chosen from several similarly-named people/aliases found on IMDB. Again, a pain, but at least I only have to do this once.
- For actors who were already in my database, I just refresh their People View info from IMDB to update the filmographies (I already have the correct IMDB URL for them from when I initially added them). In some cases, I will do this in batches, several people at a time.
- By the time I'm finished importing a batch of movies, I'll often have spurious People records due to the incorrect names/aliases that were added from the import plugins. They're easy to find, because after the corrections I made above, they will have no filmographies. I group the People View by Career, and any listed as "Undefined" get deleted with CTRL held down.
There's really more to it than this... adding screen shots to movies, photos for people, biographical info from several sources, etc. But this is the gist of it.
Aimhere
P.S. - up to 3023 (visible) movies, 5238 people, and a 1.42GB database size now. (Sadly, I'm getting new movies faster than I can catalog or watch them. Broadband Internet makes it too easy!)
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