Cinema Premiere online movie manager / DVD organizer. Import, organize, search, sort and play your movies on all types of media.
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Searching For Movies


There are four ways to search for movies. You can use the 'Movies' screen which uses the fields selected on the Tools -> Options -> Default Search screen as the search and sort criteria to find and display movies. You can use the Search -> Simple screen to select movies based on some basic search criteria. You can use the Search -> Advanced screen to select movies based on all types of search criteria. For the Personal Server edition only, from the Search -> Cmd Line screen, you can select movies based on a MySQL command line query.

Views

On each of the above mentioned screens, there are five different views to choose from to display the selected movies. The view that defaults on all the screens is the view selected on the Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous screen. You can change the view by selecting a view type from the drop down list. Upon selecting a new view and pressing GO, the search results will be redisplayed in the new format. The screen must be completely loaded before you can access the different buttons and links for each movie. You can only play movies from the movie manager if you are running Cinema Premiere's browser. If you are not, nothing will happen when you click on the image or play link.

Thumbnail

Displays columns of four cover images in a row. If the movie is a movie file on your hard drive, the help text "Play Movie" will appear when your mouse moves over the image. When you click on the image, the movie will play using your default movie player. (The free version of BSplayer is very good.)

If the movie is a DVD or any other media type that does not reside on your hard drive, the movie's media type and location will appear as the help text when your mouse moves over the image. The movie's location can be set in three ways. When a movie name is imported from a text file, the location can be defined on the first or second line of the text file in the format of ':location'. If it is, then every movie name in the text file will be given that location unless the movie name has a location appended to it between two vertical bars. For example H:\DVD\POPEYES VOYAGE [PG].avi|movie location| or Willy Wonka|movie location| will be given the location 'movie location'. The location can also be added on the Tools -> Edit -> Single screen.

Below the cover image is the title of the movie. If you click on the title, the plot will be displayed along with title, genre, MPAA rating, and user rating. The title for movie files will be in dark blue bold.

Summary

Displays a short detail summary of each movie which includes the cover image, title, genres, MPAA rating and description of rating, user rating, playing time, year released, media type and location. It also has a link to IMDb.com or Amazon.com for the movie, a link to the edit screen for the movie, a link to display the plot information and you can also update the seen and the personal rating fields from this screen. As with the Thumbnail view, you can play movie files by clicking the cover image and the title for movie files will be in dark blue bold. .

List

Displays 7 columns of information for each movie, but does not include the cover image. Each column can be sorted on in either ascending or descending order. The seen and personal fields can be edited directly from this screen. If you click on the plot arrow, the plot will be displayed along with title, genre, MPAA rating, and user rating. If you click on the Info (Edit) arrow, you will be taken to the Edit screen for that movie. The titles for movie files will be in dark blue bold and you can play the movie by clicking on the title.

Text

This is the fastest at listing all your movies since it displays only the title and a link to the edit screen for each movie. The title for movie files will be in dark blue bold and you can play the movie by clicking on the title.

Detail

Displays a separate page for each movie giving all the details possible for each movie along with the cover image. For movie files you can play the movie by clicking on the image and the title for movie files will be in dark blue bold. You can not edit any fields on this screen, however, you can go to the edit screen by clicking the info link below the image. There is also a link to IMDb.com or Amazon.com for the movie. The arrows at the top right of the screen will take you either forward or backward one page and the double arrows will take you to either the first movie or the last movie.

Number of Movies Per Page

Beside the view is a drop down menu where you can select the number of movies per page to display. The number of movies to display defaults to your Options -> Misc values for Thumbnail, Summary and Text. It defaults to 1 for Detail and defaults to All for Text.

Export to txt File

From each search screen you have the option to export the search results to a text file that can either be printed as a nice quick reference to all your movies or it can be copied to a removable media and viewed on your PDA which is a handy thing to have at Blockbuster to know which movies you have already seen or have at home.

After the search has completed and the selected movies are displayed, the 'Export to txt File' button will be displayed on the search results screen. Clicking on this button will open the Export Search Results screen where you can select which fields and the order of the fields that you wish to export to a text file which can be printed out or downloaded.

In the Delimiter field you can select any character to separate your field data. Spaces can also be added before and after the delimiter if you wish. If the '|' is used as the delimiter, a trailing '|' will be placed at the end of the exported data for each movie. This is so a user could export the title and location and use that text file to import movies using the Add -> Import Txt feature.

If the Include Date box is checked, today's date will be written out to the text file. It will be in parenthesis at the end of all the movies.

If the Include Search Title box is checked, the complete search query is written to the text file next to the number of movies found. If it is not checked, only the number of movies found will be written to the text file.

Once you have selected the fields and their order, press the 'Export' button to create the text file. Once the text file is created, if you click on the 'View In Browser Window' link, the log file will be displayed in a new window. If you want to print it out, you can select File -> Print from the window's menu bar. If you wish to preview it first, select File -> Print Preview. If you wish to change the margins, select File -> Page Setup.

If you click on the 'Download File (Save as search.txt)' link, the File Download screen will pop up. Select Save to save it to your hard drive.

The text file was renamed to .doc to allow it to be downloaded (.txt files will open in a browser window). You may wish to rename it back to .txt.

If the file opens in your browser window instead of displaying the download screen, a possible cause is that .doc is not defined as a file type on your computer. Open Windows Explorer and select Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types. Scroll down the list of Registered file types and see if 'doc' is there. If not, click on 'New' to add it. Click Change (Opens With) and select or Browse to Notepad.

On the Personal Server edition of the movie manager running the CP Browser you can select Open/Edit With Default Editor to open the text file with your default editor instead of downloading the text file.

Print Search Results

Besides printing out the exported text file as described above, you can also print in the format of the Thumbnail, Summary and Detail view. To do so, on either the Movies, Simple Search or Advanced Search screen, once the movies have been displayed, press the Print button located near the top right portion of the screen (NOT the Print button that is part of the browser). The search results will be displayed in a printer friendly format closely resembling the format of your current view type, but including only the movies and no menus, search fields or page information

For the Thumbnail view, the width has been slightly compressed to allow for a 1 inch left margin in case one wants to add them to a 3-ring binder. The number of rows that will fit on a page varies depending on the length of the movie titles and your print page margin settings. Setting the margins to: Top 1.1, Bottom 1, Left 1 and Right 0.5 works pretty well most of the time and you typically get 4 rows of Thumbnails per page. If you like, you can also manually adjust the number of

For the Summary view, the column of information of the right has been removed. The personal rating and seen fields have been moved next to the user rating. Setting the margins to: Top 1.1, Bottom 1, Left 1 and Right 0.5 works very well most of the time and you get 5 summaries per page.

For the Detail view, the background color has been removed and the width has been slightly compressed to allow for a 1 inch left margin in case one wants to add them to a 3-ring binder. The detail view is slightly different than the other views. Besides having the Print button, it also has a Print All button. The Print will print out the current movie displayed. The Print All button will print out all the movies returned in the search results and will start each new movie on a separate page.

Once you have press the search results Print button, if you are using Cinema Premiere's browser, press the browsers Print button. A Print Preview screen will appear. At the very top next to 'Print...' there is a Page Setup button. In Page Setup you can adjust your page margins. C P's browser uses the same print interface as Internet Explorer. When you are satisfied how it fits on the page, press Print...You can close the Print Preview screen and press Back on your browser to return to your movie manager.

If you are using IE or Firefox, select File -> Page Setup to adjust your margins. In Firefox, you can also adjust your header and footer information. From File -> Print Preview you can see how it fits on the page. When you are satisfied how it fits on the page, press Print...You can close the Print Preview screen and press Back on your browser to return to your movie manager.


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