I spent some time this last weekend downloading some other templates and finding out what stuff is out there that would be a good addition to my sheets. One thing I found that I really liked was Common coding components. Currently, with the Movie sheets, the Season sheets and the Episode sheets, I have 3 sets of the same images in many cases that I am using for the template design. Next time I find some spare time, I am going to take a page from Buhric's book and re-factor my code to include a 'Common' folder then have all three of my templates pull from there. This should cut the size of the Movie sheets folder down by 2/3. Worth my time, I think. Obviously this is a coding best practice anyway. But, as I am fairly new to coding with XSLT, I didn't know it was something that could be done. It will be done!
Speaking of Buhric, as I was browsing through his template's code, I found a method that allows him to look through the list of studios provided by ThumbGen and produce and returns the image for the first one on the list that HAS an image in the Studios folder. With my sheets now, this is a manual process and it would really cool to implement a version of this for my sheets. It would save me a whole lot of time.
Another change I would like to make would be to increase the size of the studio graphics in the template. They seem to be a tad too small, in relationship to the other graphics in the media format row.
Another thing that I saw that I really liked was some US_Certification images that were fairly standardized. The ones that I have now are squares that I created that honestly don't look as nice as they could. I borrowed those from an original version of the Cylent Showcase, that wasn't overrun with the Aussie versions since the template I originally started with had the US certs removed. About moving the Cert image to the end of the media format row and put it between the studio and the subtitles box.
I signed up for a MediaFire account so for those of you who wish for a copy of my template, after I finish the above round of changes, I will put them up and drop a link here in the blog. I have a move coming up later this month, but hopefully I will still have time to finish these changes and get the templates up before then.
This evening or tomorrow, I will do a post talking about my Episode and Season sheets, with samples :]
Hope everyone is having a great Wednesday!
Jim
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Background Distribution
I wanted to give a shout out and say thanks to Stephen at BallastMedia.com for giving me the OK to use / distribute his wonderful background that I use with my movie sheet templates, in addition to the background on my media player at home.
Thanks dude!
Thanks dude!
Thursday, January 6, 2011
JHS Movie Sheets V0.9.0
BACKGROUND:
First I will provide a little background. These movie sheets are designed to be used with ThumbGen application. This highly configurable and powerful application allows you to create a 'movie sheet', a JPEG image containing IMDB information on a movie, up to four screen shots and many other pieces of information. If you own a streaming media player such as the WDTV Live, this application is an absolute must-have.
The basic templates are standard XML based. On its own, this doesn't allow you much dynamic flexibility inside of the movie sheets. Another aspect of the templates are the XSLT component. XSLT allows you to perform on-the-fly dynamic changes to the movie sheets based on information provided to you. Each template.xml file has its own template.xslt counter-part to perform the substitutions.
ABOUT:
Now, high level information about my movie sheet templates. My template was originally based upon Cylent's Multiplex Showcase Info variant. I believe it was a Australian version, because the original didn't come with US certifications. I liked the cleanliness of that particular movie sheet layout, but at the same time, it provided a lot of pertinent information. I only have been creating the full SHEET templates at this point. In the future, I may make a version of the template for WALL and STD modes as well, but I don't like the idea because it will get rid of visual real estate and make it look sloppy.
I had originally used a different template for my TV Season and Episode sheets. They turned out much more cluttered and sloppy than I preferred. So, I redesigned them using my JHS sheets as my default template. I will touch on these in a future post.
FEATURES:
P 3/5
Picture 3/5
picture 30/100
p 3.4/8
p 3.75/10.8
You can do the exact same thing with 'Audio' as well. Both are mutually exclusive. You can have a picture quality rating by itself, or an audio quality rating by itself or both together. Regardless of the fraction used, the output score will be shown on a 5 star visual rating scale.
I tend to use these for my Blu-ray movies. I will manually pull the scores from Blu-ray.com and assign them to the movies, then save them in the TG Metadata for future use. When no PQ or AQ values are explicitly found, the rating pictures, as well as the labels, will disappear. This is very handy for keeping the standard DVD movie sheets clean.
I have plans to go over more features soon. Check back as this is a work in progress. Whenever I find somewhere to host them, I will make the templates available for download.
First I will provide a little background. These movie sheets are designed to be used with ThumbGen application. This highly configurable and powerful application allows you to create a 'movie sheet', a JPEG image containing IMDB information on a movie, up to four screen shots and many other pieces of information. If you own a streaming media player such as the WDTV Live, this application is an absolute must-have.
The basic templates are standard XML based. On its own, this doesn't allow you much dynamic flexibility inside of the movie sheets. Another aspect of the templates are the XSLT component. XSLT allows you to perform on-the-fly dynamic changes to the movie sheets based on information provided to you. Each template.xml file has its own template.xslt counter-part to perform the substitutions.
ABOUT:
Now, high level information about my movie sheet templates. My template was originally based upon Cylent's Multiplex Showcase Info variant. I believe it was a Australian version, because the original didn't come with US certifications. I liked the cleanliness of that particular movie sheet layout, but at the same time, it provided a lot of pertinent information. I only have been creating the full SHEET templates at this point. In the future, I may make a version of the template for WALL and STD modes as well, but I don't like the idea because it will get rid of visual real estate and make it look sloppy.
I had originally used a different template for my TV Season and Episode sheets. They turned out much more cluttered and sloppy than I preferred. So, I redesigned them using my JHS sheets as my default template. I will touch on these in a future post.
FEATURES:
- Dynamic Media Info Boxes - There are six total data points that the Media Info section can display. [Video Bitrate (VBR); Video Framerate (VFR); Video Aspect Ratio (VAR); Audio Bitrate (ABR); Number of Audio Channels(ACH); File Size (FSZ)] The great thing about this is you can have any variation of these. For instance, if you have values in VFR, ABR and FSZ, but not in VBR, VAR or ACH. The tool will automatically display the three boxes that have values. These displayed boxes and values will be centered on the main picture. I made this to ignore the 'VBR' (Variable) value that is sometimes placed in Video Bitrate and Audio Bitrate fields. The template will act like it is an empty value and not display it.
- Different Color Themes for Media Info Boxes and Episode/Season and Season/Discs boxes - I thought the older color schemes, which had a palette of soft pastel colors, well... sucked. So I changed those out for more distinguishable colors: Red for Video, Blue for Audio, Green for File Size, Orange for TV Series Info. These colors easily distinguishable from each other and work well together.
- Hidden Tags - Subtitles and tag line labels and quotation marks will disappear when there is no value for them.
- Dynamic Run Time - IMDB has its stock listed run time, but I prefer to show the duration of the movie file if possible. If ThumbGen is able to determine the video file's length, it will display that in the run time field. Otherwise, it will use the run time value retrieved by the collector.
- Picture and Sound Quality Ratings - This is another feature that took me a while to figure out how to implement, but turned out very good. I do custom parsing on the Comments field. It can be used as follows:
P 3/5
Picture 3/5
picture 30/100
p 3.4/8
p 3.75/10.8
You can do the exact same thing with 'Audio' as well. Both are mutually exclusive. You can have a picture quality rating by itself, or an audio quality rating by itself or both together. Regardless of the fraction used, the output score will be shown on a 5 star visual rating scale.
I tend to use these for my Blu-ray movies. I will manually pull the scores from Blu-ray.com and assign them to the movies, then save them in the TG Metadata for future use. When no PQ or AQ values are explicitly found, the rating pictures, as well as the labels, will disappear. This is very handy for keeping the standard DVD movie sheets clean.
I have plans to go over more features soon. Check back as this is a work in progress. Whenever I find somewhere to host them, I will make the templates available for download.
 |
| High Quality Blu-ray |
 |
| Low Quality Blu-ray |
 |
| An example of standard DVD sheet, without subtitles |
 |
| Blu-ray sheet showing full media info and quality ratings |
 |
| DVD sheet showing partial media info |
Welcome to the JHS Blog
Thanks for visiting my blog. Here, I will be detailing what I have done so far with my templates, as well as ideas for future features. I will post lots of screen shots, and try to find somewhere to host the templates so that you may download them if you wish. Please feel free to comment with any additional ideas you may have.
Jim
Jim
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