Managing Jobs
Within each environment is a list of jobs. These jobs contain all the segments for your animated sequence. If you are creating a weekly television series called The Show
, you could name your job show_ep_06 (the_show would be the name of your environment).
If each episode was composed of 100 animated shots, each job would contain 100 scenes.
Each job must have a unique name. You cannot have two jobs with the same name, even if they appear in two different environments. On the server, all the jobs are contained in the same folder.
As you continue working on your animation project, you may want to update the status of the jobs in your environment. This status can display one of three things:
• | The stage the job has reached |
• | When the job will be vectorized |
• | When the job will be rendered |
As you complete your animation project, you can update a job's status to reflect where it is in the overall production process. You can classify jobs as being "In Production" or "Completed".
• | In Production: The job is still a work in progress. The other nodes can still access this job. |
• | Completed: The job is finished. The Harmony database still has all the job's components (scenes, elements, drawings), but the job neither appears nor is accessible from the Harmony applications. |
In most cases, you would mark a job as "Completed" after it has been finalized (inked, painted, rendered) and transferred to a medium, such as Blu-ray, or sent to post-production.
You can change a job's status from "Completed" to "In Production" at any time to continue working on it.
If you want to remove a job and its data from the Harmony database and archive it, you can export the job from Control Center.
Before you send a job's scenes to be vectorized or rendered, you can change the job's priority level in the processing queue. Increasing a job's priority lets the system process it before other jobs in the processing queue.
Use the Choose New Priority dialog box to change a job's rendering and vectorization queue priority. The priority is set using a sliding scale where 0 is the highest priority and 10 is the lowest.
For example, if job B is before job A in the queue, you can change the priority, so job A is processed first.
Changing a job's priority does not affect vectorizing or rendering jobs that are already sent in the queue. It will only affect jobs that are sent after making the change. If you want to change a job's priority after it has been sent to the queue, use the Change Priority button in the Queue window.
You should only delete jobs that you no longer need or that have already been exported to an archive (using the Export command available in the Admin menu).
When you delete a job, the following components are permanently removed:
• | Scenes |
• | Elements |
• | Drawings |
• | Database information associated with the selected job |
• | Palettes stored under the selected job |
Before you delete a job:
• | Make sure no one else is currently using the job. Failure to do this may result in file corruption and loss of your work. |
• | Wait until everyone is offline. This ensures no one can open the data files while you delete them. |
Changing the job's stage from In Production to Completed only hides the job in the Control Center window; all the associated files with the job are still on your system.
- In the Environments section, select the project in which you want to create a job.
- Do one of the following:
‣ | From the top menu, select Job > Create. |
‣ | Right-click in the Jobs section and select Create. |
The Create Job dialog box appears.
- In the Name field, type the name of the job you want to create.
- In the TD menu, select a technical director (TD). You must select a technical director to create the job.
A TD is usually the person who oversees the animation project and makes sure the work is done properly. Select the person who most closely resembles this definition. If you do not have a particular user for the task, you can simply assign usabatch.
When you create your Harmony users, you can label a user as a technical director (TD).
- In the ATD menu, select an assistant technical director (ATD). You must select an assistant technical director to create the job. If you do not have an ATD, select the same person for the TD and ATD jobs.
In some studios, the responsibilities of the technical director can be shared by more than one person. This second person is the ATD.
The technical director and assistant technical director you select appear in the Scenes list for each scene of the job.
- In the Approval menu, select how Harmony will mark the various stages the scenes will pass in your production schedule.
‣ | Automatic: When you work on your scenes, Harmony automatically approves their status at each stage |
‣ | Manual: When you work on the scenes, the technical director or the assistant technical director must approve their status at each stage using the Change Stage command (available in the Scene menu). |
- Drag the slider to adjust the priority. 0 = the highest priority for processing through the Vectorize or Render queue and 10 = a priority of 10 is the least important. Items with higher priorities pass in front of other projects with lower priorities in the Vectorize and Render queues even if there is already a queue processing.
If you do not know what priority to assign to your project, you can leave it at 5. You can always change it later.
- Click OK.
Control Center adds your new job to the selected environment and it appears in alphabetical order in the Jobs list.
- In the Environments section, select an environment.
- Do one of the following:
‣ | From the top menu, select Job > Change Stage. |
‣ | Right-click in the Jobs section and select Change Stage. |
The Change Stage of Jobs window appears.
- Select the jobs you want to change the stage.
‣ | If you want to change a job from In Production to Completed, select the jobs in the In Production list. |
‣ | If you want to change a job from Completed to In Production, select the jobs in the Completed list. |
- Click one of the Change buttons to change the job's status.
‣ | Click the Change to Completed button to change a job that is in production. |
‣ | Click the Change to In Production button to change a job that is completed. |
- Click OK.
- In the Environments section, select the environment containing the job you want to change the priority for.
- In the Jobs section, select the job whose priority you want to change.
- Do one of the following:
‣ | From the top menu, select Job > Change Priority. |
‣ | Right-click in the Jobs section and select Change Priority. |
The Choose New Priority dialog box appears.
- Drag the slider to adjust the priority. 0 = the highest priority for processing through the Vectorize or Render queue and 10 = a priority of 10 is the least important. Items with higher priorities pass in front of other projects with lower priorities in the Vectorize and Render queues even if there is already a queue processing.
- Click OK. When you send this job to be vectorized or rendered, it will have this new priority in the processing queue.
- In the Environments section, select the environment containing the job you want to delete.
- In the Jobs section, select the job you want to delete.
- Do one of the following:
‣ | From the top menu, select Job > Delete. |
‣ | Right-click in the Jobs section and select Delete. |
The Confirm dialog box appears.
- Click OK.