I’m building out a projects/task tracker for video production work and I’m wondering if there are best practices for birdseye tracking across entities with different hierarchical structures.
We have movies and TV shows. TV Shows consist of Seasons which consist of episodes. Movies are the beginning and end of the hierarchy.
For the projects, each episode will go through the same production steps as the movie so we are applying tasks at the Movie level and Episode level.
Does it make sense to have TV Shows and Movies in the same table or should I have them in separate tables to account for the hierarchy that TV has?
Ultimately, I’d love to be able to track individual episode progress as well as progress of the entire series.
Hmmm… that’s a tricky one. I’m not sure if there’s a “perfect” way of solving this. I feel like in an ideal world, you would want both TV Shows and Movies to be as similar as possible, so you can easily setup just one set of automations, one set of tasks, one set of reports, one set of integrations, etc.
Movies are really only 1 level deep (“the movie”), but TV shows can be up to 3 levels deep (“the tv show / the season / the episode”).
Although I was wondering if the movie might be 2 levels deep, due to associated projects that might go along with the movie? For example: “the movie itself”, “movie trailer 1”, “movie trailer 2”, etc.
If so, you might want to combine TV shows & seasons together, which would then enable you to standardize everything across 2 levels.
For example:
LEVEL 1 → LEVEL 2:
Movie Name → Full Movie
Movie Name → Trailer 1
Movie Name → Trailer 2
TV Show Season 1 → Episode 1
TV Show Season 1 → Episode 2
TV Show Season 1 → Episode 3
TV Show Season 2 → Episode 1
TV Show Season 2 → Episode 2
TV Show Season 2 → Episode 3
Thoughts?
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Sounds like you have
- Movies
- TV Shows
- Seasons
- Episodes
- Projects
- Tasks
What is a “project”? Is a project either a movie or an episode, or something else? Are the production steps the same as tasks for a project? Are all tasks at the episode level, or are there also tasks at the season or TV show level?
How much overlap is there in other fields for TV Shows, Movies, and Episodes? If there is a lot of overlap at only one level, that is what I would combine. If there isn’t significant overlap, I would use different tables.
As for the Tasks table, I am inclined to have multiple linked record fields–one for each level of the hierarchy that might have tasks, and then do some validation/automation regarding which linked records should be filled out.
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@ScottWorld for this Base, we are only concerned with the main media itself meaning no trailers or other ancillary content. Your 2-level solution would be perfect otherwise.
@Kuovonne A project is either a movie or episode that follows the same production steps. Only episodes would have tasks assigned to them initially, but it may be possible that we do archival, for example, for the entire season at once.
Sounds like episodes and movies might go in the same table.
Yeah I think I’ll work on making a single table work. Thank you both for the help!
Right, this is what my 2-level structure outlines above. So just get rid of the first level (which seems unnecessary), and you’re golden. 