Sep 06 2008
IMDb Pro reporting woes
I’ve been using IMDb to research the relationship of film editors (and assistants) with directors and having difficulty because the web interface doesn’t provide any type of advanced searching and reporting. IMDb Pro purports to have these features and, lo and behold, the Advanced Search page has every field you’d want to use when generating a custom report.
Anticipating great things I entered an extensive amount of search criteria spanning decades, film grosses, English language, etc. The results were a mess: not a single criterion was met.
Thinking I was taxing the system with complexity I tried this simple search with the intention of finding popular films in 1990:
- Released films from 1/1990 to 12/1990
- US Box Office Gross between 10M and 999M
Result? Films from the 1970s through 1990s and the BO gross was disregarded completely. Not good.
I sent a tech support request to IMDb and their answer wasn’t reassuring:
Greetings from the Internet Movie Database;
Thank you for contacting us.
Unfortunately, our current search forms do not provide a way to find this information. We are working on a number of enhancements to the site that will include a way to perform this search. There is no announced launch date for this new service.
You can also try posting your question in one of our online message boards (http://pro.imdb.com/boards/). One of the boards, called “I Need to Know”, is the right place to post questions you don’t know the answer to. Perhaps one of your fellow IMDb users can help:
http://pro.imdb.com/board/bd0000001/threads/
Please let us know if we can offer further assistance.
Nice to know what I’m paying for doesn’t actually exist but that’s another discussion. On the positive, IMDb offers their entire database as downloadable files for personal use. After downloading gigs of text files I opened one and expected to see a record format like this:
"Snyder, Zack","Watchmen"
"Snyder, Zack","300"
"Synder, Zack","Dawn of the Dead"
Instead:
Snyder, Zack[tab][tab]Watchmen
[tab][tab]300
[tab][tab]Dawn of the Dead
This is nearly unusable because it needs to be parsed into a column format for import into a database system. I attempted to use IMDbPy, a Python search library, for custom reporting but getting it to run is another matter. I decided against using software such as Eric’s Movie Database and JMDB because their reporting features weren’t detailed.
This leaves one option: writing my own software. Considering I don’t need to report on all IMDb data (just movie titles, editors, and directors) it makes the work a bit simpler. A record parser is being written in Perl to generate a properly formatted CSV file then imported to FileMaker Pro or Access where customized reports are a no-brainer.
It’s unfortunate IMDb Pro’s reporting feature is broken. Even worse that they advertise it as feature.
Related posts: