Copying and Pasting Drawings

When you copy and paste a selection in the Timeline view, you are not copying and pasting the actual drawings, you are pasting the exposure. Exposure is a property; it is the length of time that a drawing is visible over a series of frames. In Harmony, exposure is independent of keyframes. That is, keyframes are not linked to drawings. Keyframes can be moved independently from the drawing exposure.

If you want to copy and paste selected drawings into a different layer or paste the selection in the same layer to duplicate the drawings, you must use the Paste Special feature.

There are four different ways to paste your selected drawings with the Paste Special dialog box:

When adding exposures to a drawing layer, drawing files will not be created.

Only create drawing files when they do not exist: When adding exposures to a drawing layer, new drawings will be created only when drawings with the same name do not already exist in the destination.

Replace existing drawings. Create drawing files when they do not exist: Replace drawings with the same names to update a scene with new modified drawings and preserve the animation.

Tip: If you don't want to lose the existing animation when pasting a template, such as when placing new drawings after the animation, then delete the template's animation. It will still have updated the drawings but not override the existing animation.

Always create drawing files: When adding exposures to a drawing layer, new drawings will always be created. If drawing files with the same name already exist, Harmony will create a new name for the drawing.

If you want to perform another Paste Special operation using the same settings you used previously, you can use the Paste Special Again command instead. You can paste your selection using the same settings as in the most recent Paste Special operation, without opening the Paste Special dialog box.