In my mind, No Theatrical Studio, therefore it is skipped and straight to production Companies.

The Publisher remains in the MC, just as it normally would

I'd like to know what the actual film credits show... I mean: if the film's opening credits clearly state something that we'd normally recognize as a "theatrical release studio", then I'd probably include it.

Hello.

Thanks for your thoughts, although like many things, there are a range of opinions.  Sometimes I find it’s fairly obvious who’s fulfilling what role, but often it’s not.  It’s the part of auditing DVDs that I least enjoy, as I often can’t get a definitive answer I’m totally confident about.  There are lots of obviously mistakes in the database too, concerning both roles and names, so I don't think it's just me that sucks at this.  T!M: this was just a general query, rather than one relating to a specific DVD, as it’s a question that I’ve found myself wondering about on a number of occasions and one that I couldn’t see gaining more experience would really help to solve very effectively.

This is really one of the weakest parts of DVD Profiler.  Not only is there no real consensus on what some of the roles are, (theatrical release studio here being an example), but because sometimes there’re no entries for some of the roles, when you download the data you can’t tell which company is fulfilling what role, as the names just get listed in the order they’re entered.  In fact you can’t even tell this for films you’ve entered the data for yourself for that matter (for the same reason), unless you have a wonderful memory or an alternative record.  This renders trying to put things in the correct order within the two sections (Studios and Media Companies) partly pointless, as only the original contributor at the time he/she entered the data actually knows for sure who did what.

Even if the database had defined fields for all the different roles within the two sections and the Rules were perfectly clear, they would still be difficult to complete accurately as the credits and sleeve often don't make the distinctions in a clear way, which means you need to spend time researching the answers, which for many smaller companies and older films is often not conclusive.  The fact that many sleeves also carry multiple references to closely linked (or the same) companies, or give their names in different ways, only muddies the water further.  Actually, Studios and Media Companies might benefit from some sort of linking system, similar to that used for Cast and Crew names; (or at least the new version of this that most people would like to see made available soon).

It would be nice in Ken was able to clean up this bit of the database in the next version, (along with the other zillion changes people would like).