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Text File | 1995-02-20 | 29.5 KB | 520 lines

This ﬁle is the plain text version of the Clapperboard manual. If you have Impression, The manual in impression format (with lots of illustrations) is in the archive “Manuals”. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• How to use Clapperboard First things first: before Clapperboard can be used, it needs to be copied to a hard disk. Being a database, it will not function from a read-only archive, or a CD-ROM. Clapperboard is supplied with several files already set up, but without any index files (required for speed). Clapperboard will create the indices that it needs automatically. Before you can start running Clapperboard, it needs to be configured. Double-click on !Clapperboard, so that it’s icon is on the icon bar. Getting started Choose the “Configure” option. This brings up the “config” window. It is divided into three areas: Users, Video Recorders and System Limits. If you are running the shareware version, the system limits cannot be altered, and are shown for inforation only. The full release version can change any or all of these. Generally, the greater the value of a system limit, the more useful Clapperboard becomes, but the more memory it consumes too. It is best to set these limits just higher than you think you’ll need them. Clapperboard will complain if you attempt to exceed a system limit. Users If all of the videotapes to be entered into Clapperboard are owned by one person, ensure “One User” is selected. If there are to be tapes entered that are owned by more than one person, select “More than one”, and enter an id and a name for the 2 major users. Ids should be upper-case, one or two chars. Video Recorders Different sorts of video recorders have different sorts of tape counter. There are four in common use (but the 0000 types are now much less common than they were). Note the difference between the ‘frame counter’ and the ‘absolute position counter’. Assuming that a tape contains 2 programmes, each of 1 hour duration; the first at SP and the second at LP. The frame counting video will show a count of “2:00:00” as 2 hours worth of frames will have passed the head. The absolute position-sensing video will show a counter of “1:30:00” as only 1.5 hours of tape have passed the head. Select the video recorder(s) that you have, and (re)name them as you see fit. You could call them “Upstairs” and “Colin’s”. Clapperboard doesn’t care, it uses these fields to prompt you for tape counts later on. Leaving config Simply close the window. Clapperboard will automatically update it’s details on disk when the window is closed. The ICON BAR menu - from the top Tape Selector The tape selector is the main window in Clapperboard. It manages videotapes. The window can be opened from the iconbar menu, or by clicking on the iconbar icon with select. The tape selector window has two smaller scrolling windows attached to it. These are called SELECTORS. The left-hand selector will show those tapes that have been included in the current selection. This will either be “All tapes” automatically if configured for one user, or a selection from the “include” area of the two named users, or all tapes. If you configured Clapperboard for more than one user, click on the “All” radio button in the Include window to show all the example tapes. Clicking on a tape selects it, loading the properties of the tape, and displaying them in the upper-right part of the window. These may be amended if required, and saved back to the database by clicking on the “Update” button. Any field in a window that is black text on a white background is an “unprotected” field - you can type in it. Text that is not bold, but on a grey background (like the version number at top right of the window) is a “protected” field. You can look at it, but you can’t modify it in any way. Also, if a selected tape has programmes recorded on it, they will be displayed on the lower- right selector. Click on tape J901, and two episodes of Blake’s Seven appear in the programmes selector. If you want to delete a tape, select it in the left-hand tape selector, and then double-click on the blue “delete” button. A convention used throughout Clapperboard is that buttons with their text in blue require a double-click. This is generally because their use requires slightly more thought. You may notice that the “Print Card” option is ticked at the bottom of the window. The use of this can be seen below in “Tape cards”. Select tape J901, and then select the first programme on that tape. A new window “Programme/Recording” (progs) will appear. This show us more information about the programme itself and the recording. If we wanted to change something in this window, as usual, you just change it, and click on “Save”. To add a new programme which has very similar details to this one, simply change unprotected fields, and click on “Add”. To generally add a new programme to a particular tape, click on the “Add” button in the videos window (just below the programmes selector). The familiar progs window will then appear with fields waiting to be entered Short cuts Entering data into a database is monotonous, boring and time-taking. So, Clapperboard will often try to help you as you enter data. The progs window has a couple of examples of this. Select “Add” on the videos window to add a new programme to J901. Notice that the tape number (and name) have already been filled in for you. Enter a title “Faulty Towers: The Germans”, and move to the type field (with <Return>, <Tab> or the down-arrow key). Since this is a comedy, we’ll enter it as such. The code for Comedy is “Co” (you can change this later). Type “c” (case doesn’t matter), and the VALUE BAR at the bottom of the window prompts “Ch - Childrens”. Leaving the type field now will enter “Ch” as the type. Since this is not right, enter the next character, “o”. The value bar will confirm “Comedy”, and you can tab to the next field. Date fields have short cuts too. Enter a number, and the value bar will change to reflect the nearest date you could be typing. “4” will prompt for the 4th of this month. “407” is this year’s 4th of July, and “40781” would be that date in 1981. As usual, on leaving the date field, the full (guessed) value will appear there. Channel fields too try and help. Entering a “B” will prompt “BBC1”; a “U” gives “UK Gold” and so on. If you enter a previously unmentioned channel, you will be given the option of adding it to the short cuts database. Finally on this screen, the two HH:MM:SS video types allow you to miss out the colons when entering a count reading. The half-size option box next to the counter field is for you to indicate whether a reading is an estimate or not. The full version of Clapperboard will automatically estimate counts in certain circumstances. Add the programme to the tape by clicking on progs’ “Add” button. Finally in this section, there is a popup button next to “Counts”. Clicking on this opens another window so that you can store the current high reached count reading (and the reading at the end of the tape for certain formats). To save this info you must click on the “Update” button on the videos main window. Find Possibly the most useful part of the program, this is where a database scores over bits of paper. Find => Programme “I know I recorded xxx, but I don’t remember what tape it’s on!” How often have you said that? What tape did we put Faulty Towers on? Open the “Find Programmes” window, and in the “Find” field, type (slowly) “Faulty”. You’ll notice that the selector gradually limits the number of programmes it is prompting you with. The beep that you’ll probably hear is an audible indicator that there’s no need to continue typing - the selector is showing you everything beginning with what you typed. Select the programme you’re interested in, and click on the “Tape” button. You’ll now see a smaller version of the videos window, with the same programme selector. “Some time ago, I recorded ”Onedin Line“, and I’ve typed ”Onedin“ in the find field, yet I see nothing!”. Ok, click on the “Contains...” radio button. The selector will disappear whilst you type, but pressing return or clicking on “All” will bring it back... the programme is “THE Onedin Line”. Using this method you can search for part names. Find => Space “Quick! Blake’s Seven is on 5 minutes, what tape has enough space for it?” Another oft-heard cry. The Find space window will do just that. Enter 50 (minutes) into the Length field and click “Find”. The selector will show those tapes with 50 minutes or more remaining. We can shrink this list further by entering the type code for Blake’s 7 (B7) in the “type” field. The search will now look for 50 minutes remaining on any tape that has ALREADY got some Blake’s 7 on it. The Owner field will further confine the search to those tapes owned by an individual. This dialogue will also find gaps in the middle of a tape... providing that you create a “dummy” programme called conventionally “*SPARE*”, but importantly with a type code of “Em” (Empty). Find => People Enter a person’s name in this find box. I tend to use the format “surname, forename”. Enter “baker, c”, and click “Edit”. You can now see details about Colin Baker. His date of birth (the exact flag means just that: 01-Jan-1943 nonexact means ‘in 1943’; 01-Jun-1943 nonexact means ‘in June 1943’; the same date exact means ‘1st June 1943’.) Any notes you may have about this person can be entered and saved here. There is no limit to how much you place here, as the field will scroll. The full version of Clapperboard allows OLE editing to occur, and external files can be dropped in, and data exported. The “Report” button in the find person dialogue produced a report listing all those programmes for which a contribution has been stored. An approximate age is also shown if it can be calculated. Reports Primarily designed for printed output, all reports on Clapperboard can be previewed on screen. Reports => Tape Cards This report is slightly unusual as it does extra work when being output to a printer. The report produces a 1/3 A4 page for each tape that has the “print card” flag set. The report shows all information for all recordings on the particular tape. It also recalculates the “Time left” field (from the videos window) for each tape, but when the report is going to the screen, the database is not updated. The reason for this is so that multiple “to screen” reports may be produced until you are happy with the information. When the report is sent to the printer, the time left on tape is updated, the “print card” flag is cleared, and the tape’s version number is incremented. This makes it easier to control those bits of paper produced. I find it handy having these 1/3 A4 “cards” filed in an A5 ring binder near the TV, so I can see what’s where on a tape without having to power the computer on. The “print card” flag is automatically set whenever a programme is added to, deleted from or updated on a tape. Report => Progs by Category This report quite simply shows all programmes recorded in a given category (and optionally, for a specified owner); or all programmes for a specific owner. Report => Full Who List This report shows all information held on the Doctor Who database (with the exception, in version 2.76, of cast/crew lists). You will be prompted for a range of production codes. The default range is “A” to “7P”, which is every story made over the 26 seasons. Other reports A similar report can be produced for the generic collections; more of that later. Other reports in the full version of Clapperboard include the facility to find out who is listed against collections x any y (crossovers); and who has appeared in collection x in more than one rôle. Collections A large proportion of Clapperboard is concerned with collections. A generic collection is defined as a number of programmes with the same generic name (for example, you could collect Blake’s Seven, Doctor Who, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Minder, The Secret Life of Plants.... the list is endless). For the nature lover, recording The Secret Life of Plants is likely to be a very simple affair. What tape is it on, and where. (Maybe when it was recorded too.) For the fan though, this information is often inadequate. Fans may want to know when a programme was originally transmitted, the dates and times of all the repeat showings, the audicence figures in millions, even the audience appreciation index figures (recorded in Britain to judge the quality of programmes). Plus of course, a list of the cast and/or members of the crew. Doctor Who is a bit different from the generic norm. Partially because I coded it long before I had the idea of generic collections, but also because it’s stories are EPISODIC. (One story is spread over many weeks.) On most other programmes, they either show a complete story each week (Such as Star Trek), or a single story with lots of parts (EastEnders etc.). Glossing over Doctor Who for the time being, I’ll explain how to set up a collection. Firstly, a note to shareware users of Clapperboard. The shareware system limit is set to 2 collections. Since shareware Clapperboard is supplied with 2 collections, this means that to add your own you’ll need to delete one of the pre-supplied ones. Note that deleting a collection is unrecoverable, but the full version allows complete collections to be imported and exported as a single file - this means that should you upgrade to the full version of Clapperboard at a later date, the deleted collections can be reinstated. The following discussion then, only applies if you have the full version of Clapperboard, or have sacriﬁced one of the supplied collections (Note that in this instance, Doctor Who does not count as a collection). Collections => Start collection In the ﬁrst ﬁeld, enter the full name of your collection “Faulty Towers”. This will appear on window title bars and on reports. Move to the next ﬁeld. This is the name of the collection that will appear on the collections menu. As “Fawlty Towers” is not too long for a menu, we can have the same text here. Simply pressing <Return> will copy the information from the full name ﬁeld. The unique type code ﬁeld is next. Enter a 2-character type code here that will be used to reference all of the collection’s recordings. I generally use upper-case type-codes for collections, and mixed-case type-codes for general use. Key “FT” in here. Note that unlike all the other ﬁelds on this window, this ﬁeld’s value cannot be changed once OK has been selected. The Next ﬁeld, description, is the description for the type code. It will be copied from the full name ﬁeld if just <Return> is pressed. The Format of Name ﬁeld is rather complicated. Using Fawlty Towers as our example, we already have 2 of these on tape. The format of the title ﬁeld (on progs) is “Faulty Towers: The Germans”. In this case, the string “Faulty Towers: ” is a literal, and “The Germans” is the episode title. Simply pressing return in this ﬁeld will enter the string “Fawlty Towers: #title#”. This will expand to match our example. The other variables that can be used are: #serial# the unique serial number of the story #season# the season number that the story is part of #scode# the season code (usually numeric) that the story is part of #prodcode# the story’s production code. Finally, there is a popup button. Clicking on this will allow you to change the ﬁeld that reports and selectors are broken on (where a sub-header will be printed). Choose “© Year” for the time being. Click OK to accept this, and the collection will have been created. Quit Clapperboard and restart it (this will then recognise the new collection). Collections => collection name This opens the collection’s main window. It is similar in layout to the videos window. The selector on the left will be empty as we have no records in the collection yet. Enter details in the unprotected ﬁelds and click on “Create” Title: Basil The Rat © year: 1980 You don’t have to ﬁll in every ﬁeld. It’s up to you. An orange bar with a sub-heading of “1980” will appear in the left-hand selector, followed by an unhighlighted “Basil The Rat”. We’ll now add those records we’ve already put onto the programmes database. It would be time-consuming to be forced to re-key this information, especially if there are a number of records already entered. Of course, you may re-key it if you wish, but here’s the short-cut. Collections => Edit collection Close the “Fawlty Towers” window, as we don’t need it at the moment. Choose the “Edit collection” option from the collections menu, and from that, click on “Fawlty Towers”. The Edit Collection window will appear. This is almost identical to the Start collection window discussed above. This time, double-click (because it is a blue button) on the “Retro” button. A window requesting help from you will appear. Since the collection’s format string contained only one variable (#title#), only that ﬁeld will be unprotected. Clapperboard needs to know how many characters wide each ﬁeld is so that it can extract information from the programmes database and put it in collections. If a ﬁeld is variable-length (and it is likely that only #title# will be) leave the length as 0, and double-click on “Start”. Clapperboard will then search the programmes database for entries that appear to match your speciﬁcations. Each programme found will be passed to the user for conﬁrmation. For each, you may “Abort” the process entirely; “Skip” this record and continue searching, or “Add” this record to the programme. Continue to add records until the conﬁrmation window disappears. At this point, you could modify your search criteria and re-Start, but we’ve now finished, so click “Cancel”. We’ve also now ﬁnished editing the collection (and we didn’t change anything), so click “Cancel” in the “Edit Collection” window. The collection is now created. You can now use the collection by selecting it from the “Collections” menu. Under the second selector is a button “Add transmission” selecting this opens a “Maintain transmission” window. Here you can key a date, time and channel of transmission; whether the programme was transmitted in stereo, black & white or was edited; and the Appreciation Index together with the number of millions of viewers who watched it and the position in the week’s chart. Channel and Date have the standard short-cuts; in addition, you may key “t” or “y” in the date ﬁeld to indicate today or yesterday. The time ﬁeld is in 24-hour hh:mm format, but as usual, you may omit the colon. Once added, transmissions appear in the selector above the “Add transmission” button. Selecting one allows you to edit details about the transmission. It also allows you to click on the “Recording” button. “Recording” allows you put the collection story on the programmes database. Selecting “Recording” if one already exists will allow the user to edit a story’s recording, no matter which transmission it was recorded from. A beep will sound if there is no recording present. The popup icon next to “Synopsis” opens a window where you can type in a synopsis of the episode in question. You may also use drag- and-drop to drop in a text ﬁle containing a synopsis, or by using <Menu>, to save a synopsis out to disc or another editor. Clapperboard supports both via-disc and in-memory transfer. Note that following the entry/update of a synopsis, the ”Update“ button in the collection window should be pressed tosave changes. The popup next to “People” opens the people window. This also has two selectors. The top one is for Cast details (actors who appeared in a programme) and Crew (those from the artistic and/or technical side who helped make a programme). Any people already entered will be shown in the selectors, and may be edited by selecting them and clicking on the “Update” button to the right. We will add some cast members to “Basil The Rat”. Select that story, and click on the people popup. An empty people window will appear. Click on the upper “Add” button and the Add person/ rôle window will appear. Enter “cleese, john” in the name ﬁeld. Case is insigniﬁcant, as Clapperboard will convert an all lower-case name to Initial caps on the caret leaving the ﬁeld. As you typed, the selector gave you fewer selections that matched what you were typing. If the name you require appears in the selector, you may click on it to enter it. If it is the top entry in the selector, you need only press <Return> to copy that name to the ﬁeld. Note that all people in the database are used to determine the actor’s name. Move to the Rôle ﬁeld. Type “Basil Fawlty”. This time, the selector will have remained blank as there are as yet no rôles deﬁned for Fawlty Towers - we’re doing the ﬁrst one now. Since John Cleese played Basil Fawlty lots of times, click on the “Default rôle” option button, then “OK”. The default rôle means that next time we select (or type) “Cleese, John”, “Basil Fawlty” will be prompted immediately as the rôle. You may make any rôle the default; this action automatically unselects the previous default if there was one. Alongside the name and rôle ﬁelds, there are popup buttons. These only work if the name in the ﬁeld is already on the database, and allows the person or rôle name to be changed. For a person, it also allows dates of birth and death to be entered, and some notes. The cast/crew associated with an individual story are held as pointers to a separate people and rôle store. In this way, retroactive editing can be carried out. So, if John Cleese’s birthday is added from “Basil The Rat”, it automatically becomes visible from everything else that John Cleese is mentioned in. The “Copy” button on the people window allows you to specify a production code of another story in this collection. It will then add all the cast/crew entries from the referenced story to the current one. This is very time-saving. The collections report It is possible to get a report about your collection by pressing <menu> over the main collections window. Choose “Report”, and select what you want printing from the available options. Collections => Delete Collection This is self-explanatory. Simply select a collection to be deleted, and it and all of it’s transmissions and rôles will be deleted. Note that people are not deleted by this process, and neither are recordings. Collections => Doctor Who Created ﬁrst, the Doctor Who subsystem is very similar to the collections subsystem. As mentioned earlier, there is an extra layer (episodes) between a story and it’s transmission, but everything else is the same as for a generic collection. The only “strange” addition is the box containing three radio buttons labelled “Episodes”, “Named” and “Parts”. Whilst all Doctor Who stories were broken down into chunks of 25 or 45 minutes duration, these were often officially called “Parts”, sometimes called “Episodes” (although Episode is the correct generic term) and sometimes neither — but these episodes were given individual names. Also of note is the blue “Omnibus” button. This is simply a short cut to add the same transmission details to every episode (with the “Edited” ﬂag set) — handy when UK Gold transmit a 6 episode story in one go! SAM Databases You will have noticed the “S-Exec” banner that appears before the Clapperboard logo on loading. This is because Clapperboard was written using S-Base developed by Longman Logotron (as was !Products, provided by Acorn with the Risc PC, so I’m in good company). S-Base 2.0 and above provides a system called the Software Application Manager (SAM) that can be used to create windows to handle simple databases automatically. There are two databases that rely on SAM’s windows as at Clapperboard version 2.76: “Programme types” and “Doctors”. Each of these subsystems will open a list window when selected. The instructions are the same for both. When the list is displayed, whatever is visible can be edited. Saving is carried out automatically when the window is closed, or the caret is moved to a different row. The ‘new card’ icon (next to the magnifying glass) is used to open up a new row; then the ‘save’ button must be used to save the addition. To delete a record, choose the magnifying glass to open the query window, and then the ‘card’ icon (second from the left) to go into a one record at-a-time mode. The ﬁle can be navigated using the arrow buttons, and a record may be deleted by use of the ‘dustbin’ icon. Close all the SAM windows and changes will have been saved. Note that Doctors and Programme types are only loaded from disk once (when they are ﬁrst needed), so you may need to quit and restart Clapperboard for your changes to be recognised. Quit Errrrr. Quit... quits! Clapperboard will no longer be running. Ensure that Clapperboard is quit before running !ClapUtil. Hopefully, you’ll never need to! !ClapUtil ClapUtil is a seperate application that shares a database with Clapperboard. Due to this, it is imperative that you do not attempt to load both programs simultaneously. Unpredictable behaviour will occur, possibly causing data loss. You have been warned! Fix control ﬁle For some inexplicable reason, I have found that the control ﬁle occasionally becomes corrupted, and Clapperboard cannot start. This option recreates the control ﬁle, and sets all options back to their defaults. It also scans the people and rôle databases to discover the data on there that needs to be stored in control. Hopefully, this option need never be used, but I have provided it just in case. Once you do this, you will need to quit ClapUtil, restart Clapperboard and reconﬁgure it. Remove Doctor Who Since the Doctor Who database is not a generic collection, the code to delete a collection cannot remove Doctor Who from the disc and menus. This option does just that. It is non-reversible (even with the full version of Clapperboard (at 2.76, anyway), and saves approximately 170kb of disc space. Quit Quits. Remember to quit ClapUtil before reloading Clapperboard. Errors No program is error-free. If anyone tells you that theirs is, then they are lying. No matter how simple a program is, there will be errors. The error may not even be in the programmer’s code, but lurking in the language compiler or operating system. Sooner or later any program will fall over. All that said, I hope that Clapperboard has as few bugs as possible. At the time of writing, I’ve removed EVERY serious bug that I’ve found, but there are still some features to be implemented (lucky people who register will get to see those!). Still, there’s only one of me, and many of you, so statisically you have a higher probability of ﬁnding a fatal error than I do. It sucks but it’s the truth. When a fatal error occurs, you will see a standard WIMP error box with the fantastic message “Error nn”. This tells you (and me!) nothing at all. However, a log of these (with useful information for me) is placed in “<Clapperbd$Dir>.ErrorLog” (within the application directory for Clapperboard). Please edit this ﬁle following such an error, and place (above the line of dashes) your comments on EXACTLY what you were doing within Clapperboard at the moment the error occurred. Copy the ﬁle out to a ﬂoppy and post it to me. If there’s room on the ﬂoppy, please also copy the “data” directory from within Clapperboard so I can have some of your data to use to reproduce the error. To reduce the size, you can delete any index ﬁles (name format= <Clapperbd$Dir>.data.ﬁlename.n where n is 0, 1, 2 or 3 are index ﬁles: don’t delete anything else! You can use the “KillIndex” obey ﬁle to do this) prior to archiving with Spark. If you’re a registered user, I’ll ﬁx the bug and return the disc as soon as possible. If you’re not, please enclose a cheque for your registration too — or I’ll ﬁx the bug and you won’t get the ﬁx! Acknowledgements Simon Glass for writing S-Base in the ﬁrst place. Longman Logotron for having the common sense to publish it. Marc Veary for providing much needed technical help and advice. Steve Sims for providing moral support (sometimes) and helpful advice (occasionally). Neil Clegg for his help with beta testing and for putting up with me at lunchtimes for the past 2 years. And ﬁnally... Martin Coulson at Atomwide for being everything a dealer should be! The Legal Stuff This program is not PD, but shareware. If you continue to use it for more than 1 month, you should become a registered user. See the ﬁle “Register” for full details. I claim the copyright over any files contained within the this directory, and the source code. The program can be passed on, but must be passed on complete (including all text ﬁles, documentation and !ClapUtil), and this includes info-servers, BBSes, and PD libraries. NO CHARGE should be made for the shareware version of this program. Like almost any computer program, this program may contain minor bugs which should not affect the general running of the program, but may crop up occasionally due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g. running on hardware/software/OS versions not the same as the author’s or under certain conditions not yet tested by the author). Users are encouraged to send any bug reports to the author at the address specified in “Register”, but the author is NOT liable for any problems (disk crashes, hung machines and the such like) that may arise from these bugs. This stems from the fact that the software is written and maintained in my own free time and cannot be guaranteed to be 100% bug-free. However, the author will always fix any reported bugs and release a fresh version of this if the bug was serious enough.