After cataloging every movie I’ve seen over the last seven years in Plex, the next obvious step was to make a poster from the covers to decorate my home theatre.
As it turned out, the technical issues for this project were roughly equal to the aesthetic ones, mostly because arranging cover images randomly didn’t particularly appeal to me: no, I wanted the full-blown OCD option of sorting them by color. (Thankfully, I am not alone in this desire: there are entire groups of people who have blogged about this before).
First I had to work out dimensions for the poster. I knew I was going to print it using my media lab’s printer, which can take canvas stock up to 48″ wide. That left me working with proportions, spacing and margins for a little while. The software I used to compile the final image, Contact Sheet X, helped a great deal in that regard (Adobe have decided to hide their Contact Sheet plugin, a standard feature of PhotoShop for over a decade, as an optional, downloadable install for PhotoShop CS4… and Contact Sheet X has more features.)
Plex stores its cover images for DVDs in a “.tbn” format, which are really just re-named .jpg files, in multiple folders. My second task was to copy all of those images into a single folder with Big Mean Folder Machine (one of those tools that you rarely need, but when you do, it’s indispensable). To return the files to their original extensions, I navigated to the folder and did a quick find and replace in the Terminal:
ls *.tbn | sed 's/(.*).tbn/ & 1.jpg/' | xargs -L1 mv(Command-line phobics might prefer to use an application like R-Name to do the same thing).
I quickly went through the folder in CoverFlow mode, disposing of anything that wasn’t suitable, and then used the excellent Contact Sheet X to batch-process the images into my PhotoShop document. The spacing and size I wanted trimmed a few DVD covers from the final image, but the majority made it in.
I’m still in the process of moving the covers around and playing with color patterns – PhotoShop CS4’s default behavior for alignment of layers, dynamic zoom, and the “auto-select layer” option for the move tool are proving vital in manipulating a final image that is over 1GB in size – but I thought readers might appreciate seeing the intermediate image.