Who has the most acting credits

Hi, bderoes:

Is there an automated way to search for people with 100+ feature film credits that are NOT silent films?

Short (and sad) answer is no... AFAIK, you can't get such a list by using the forms at ATS or ANS. The only way of trying to search for people who meet those requirements is by parsing the datasets in plain text format. Theoretically, silent films should be readily identifiable just by looking at two variables: languages ("None") and sound mix ("Silent").
So, can we use the datasets?

• tsv files: Here's the second sad answer: the current text files made public by
  don't contain any of those two variables to filter out silent films; beyond a mere year range approach (before/after 1927), nothing more can be done.
• list files: Former text files did contain both language and sound-mix info (besides much more different data than tsv files). However -misfortunes come in threes-, they're not (and will no longer be) updated since December 2017. Also, they lack the common and unique keys (ttconsts, nmconsts) to cross-reference their fields and values with those within the tsv files, so we can't "merge" them and take advantage of all the archives at once.

Even if I could get a list of potential candidates, and research the silent films by hand, that would help. Thanks in advance, but feel free to say no.

Evaluating choices... ...  ... ... Done!Despite the aforementioned faults, I'll post here a small analysis. A few premilinar comments:

• You say you only want films, so I've excluded made-for-video titles (V), made-for-TV titles (TV), series, episodes and videogames.
• You say you only want acting credits, so I've excluded (self), (archive footage) or (credit only) entries. On the other hand, you say nothing about uncredited performances, so I'll aggregate them into the final results.
• You say you only want released titles, so I've excluded around 80,000 films which don't have a year listed yet (????).
• When using the list files, only one of the two helping variables to separate silent films (language, sound-mix) is truly useful in the end, because unfortunately a very few titles from that period have the "None" language listed, as you can see below:
  
  Conversely, sound-mix info seems to be well represented for that timeframe, with a high percentage of "Silent" films labeled as such.
  
  

Here are the results:

DATASET ANALYZED: TSV FILES

        Files used:
                · name.filmography.tsv@05 Jul 2020
                · title.basics.tsv@07 Jul 2020

        

1,221,042 films out of 6,964,909 titles.

                 SILENT ERA (1874-1929): 138,720 titles (11.4%).
                 TRANSITION PERIOD (1930-1938): 27,214 titles (2.2%).
                 SOUND ERA (1939-2115): 1,055,108 titles (86.4%).

        

8,627,911 acting credits out of 142,796,275 name filmography credits.

                 65.9% actor (5,683,857 credits) vs 34.1% actress (2,944,054 credits).
                 SILENT ERA (1874-1929): 404,124 credits (4.7%) ~ 34.6% of them for actresses.
                     TRANSITION PERIOD (1930-1938): 286,141 credits (3.3%) ~ 28.1% for actresses.
                     SOUND ERA (1939-2115): 7,937,646 credits (92.0%) ~ 34.3% for actresses.

        

Definition of potential candidate (arbitrary):

                  "Person with more than 100 film credits when adding up their 100% sound era
                    film credits and 75% of transition period film credits"

There are 3,562 NAMES who meet this criteria.

DATASET ANALYZED: LIST FILES

        Files used:
                · actors.list@22 Sep 2017
                · actresses.list@22 Dec 2017
                · movies.list@22 Dec 2017
                · sound-mix.list@22 Dec 2017
                · language.list@22 Dec 2017

        

1,067,875 films out of 4,697,740 titles.

                 SILENT SOUND MIX: 134,918 titles (12.6%).
                 UNAVAILABLE SOUND MIX (blank or unmatched field): 718,159 titles (67.3%).
                 NON-SILENT SOUND MIX: 214,798 titles (20.1%).

        

7,532,079 acting credits out of 25,716,233 cast credits.

                 66.2% actor (4,987,518 credits) vs 33.8% actress (2,544,561 credits).
                 SILENT SOUND MIX: 391,726 credits (5.2%) ~ 34.8% of them for actresses.
                     UNAVAILABLE SOUND MIX: 3,908,307 credits (51.9%) ~ 35.6% for actresses.
                     NON-SILENT SOUND MIX: 3,232,496 credits (42.9%) ~ 31.5% for actresses.

       

Definition of potential candidate (arbitrary):

                  "Person with more than 100 film credits when adding up their 100% non-silent
                   sound mix film credits and 95% of unavailable sound mix film credits"

There are 3,124 NAMES who meet this criteria.

Hope this is what you needed... Cheers!