Film studio Flag Icons - Post new ones here!

Jeroen Wrote:Travis has said on the tmdb forum he would like to add it to the next version of tmdb in january. So that's good news.

I would like everyone to give their thoughts on things like dimensions and such. The current possible ways of implementing studio flags are hacky and time consuming to say the least, a proper way is much needed. Maybe we could come to some sort of consensus in advance.

I have to agree with CCMatrix...vector sounds like a good idea, because it doesn't need dimensions. All we'd have to do is decide how much of a percentage of the "frame" should be blank so that all logos occupy the same space.

My thoughts on how to get it to work in conjunction with TMDB would be to simply have a studio entry. That entry has the logo stored to it. The entry would also be linked to "alternative names" (20th century fox, twentieth century fox, etc). Then we just store one SVG file for all studio names that use that logo, and link it to the movie.

Then, when XBMC or MIP or UMM or whatever program you're using to scrape hits a movie, it stores an image ID or something for that studio logo.

SO, instead of downloading the logo over and over again for each movie, it gets downloaded once into a folder of all studio logos...and then XBMC database simply links to that image.

Sounds the easiest to me...

digitalhigh Wrote:Sounds the easiest to me...

Well, XBMC would have to get .svg support first

Personally I think svg is a bit overkill for something that will take up a small place in terms of dimensions.

In the case of png's, I think there only needs to be a maximum resolution, and there should not be any empty space around the logo. Why? Because by using horizontal and vertical aligning and setting <keepaspectratio> to keep, the skinner can position and size any logo the way he wants.

Jeroen Wrote:Well, XBMC would have to get .svg support first

Personally I think svg is a bit overkill for something that will take up a small place in terms of dimensions.

In the case of png's, I think there only needs to be a maximum resolution, and there should not be any empty space around the logo. Why? Because by using horizontal and vertical aligning and setting <keepaspectratio> to keep, the skinner can position and size any logo the way he wants.

The interesting thing is that with the files I've converted so far...there's actually about a 50% average reduction in filesize. And Vector Magic has got a nice batch-conversion feature...I can have everything converted to svg in about an hour.

I understand your feelings on .png; but the problem will remain that somebody will always want a bigger image. Almost guaranteed. While you and I both can't see a reason for wanting a giant studio image...I can bet someone will.

And I get the idea about not needing empty space...but it seems that there was a logical reason for wanting it. Something to do with the great variation in dimensions for the logos...

Yeah, Vector Magic's pretty good. Not sure about batch processing all logo's though. There are some logos which consist of a "complex" picture and text. The graphic and text would need different trace settings.

Take Lakeshore for instance:

http://u1.imgupload.co.uk/1260662400/65b...inment.png

While it works pretty good for the image, the text doesn't look accurate. Granted, this is a quicky and probably could be done better adjusting the settings, but that's the problem with batch processing

Maybe I'm just picky

I think batch converted versions from the old pngs can be a start but since some pngs already lost a lot of information this might not work very well for more complex logos. We would still have to go through all the logos and recreate those that lost detail or just look odd. If you've converted all of them could you upload them to e.g. mediafire?

The filesize does get smaller for simpler logos but can increase for more complex logos (compared to the 161x109 images) but compared to the larger images they should all be very small.

I would make all the studio logos to match the actual logo size without any margin. When the actual specs of the images for tmdb is finalized all images can then be converted to pngs. If there is no such tool out there writing one for exactly that task shouldn't be a problem.

Maybe we don't even have to do that if XBMC does add support for SVGs. Keep in mind that 9.11 is almost out the door and then it is another ~6 months until the next stable. This feature wouldn't make it into XBMC before then anyway.

VectorMagic's batch processing feature seems a tad buggy...as in it likes to crash after processing 15-20 images. However, I'll keep plunking away at em and archive them. I realize that there is going to be some image degradation in the more complex ones, but like CCmatrix says, it'll be a nice start as a large majority of them will be viable. There will still have to be a proofing process where we check them all for quality and replace the bad ones...but we can at least have scalable images which can be quickly exported to w/e dimensions we prefer.

The main problem I see with vector images is that there will be less people that are easily able to create/correct/improve them, PNG image can be created by pretty much any graphics program where vector images are a little more specialized which could reduce the number of volunteer artist quite a bit.

The conversion of the existing collection of logo's to their vector equivalents will take some doing and quite a bit of manual work as auto conversions have a tendency to automatically look less nice then manual conversions. But on the other hand this is a one off pain. Once converted the scalability and versatility of the vector images will quickly push the PNG logo's out of the picture.

With TVDB and MOVIEDB supporting these logo's and thus an ability for the scrapers to pick them up automatically there should be no reason not to choose for the superior quality offered by vector images.

XBMC support is not unlikely to happen if there is enough pressure on the development team and looking at the number of skins that support studio and other logo's that pressure will be quite large in deed.

Syfy

Fernferret's site isn't up, so is there a repository for studio flags elsewhere?

OsgoodeLawyer Wrote:Fernferret's site isn't up, so is there a repository for studio flags elsewhere?

Yes, the GitHub StudioLogos repository.