Working Remotely

Working from home is an increasingly popular trend that has advantages as well as challenges. Smooth data transfer and proper versioning will go a long way to help maintain efficiency.

When working with a Harmony Database in a studio, the scenes and assets are located on the server and the users can edit them directly. With Internet connections varying in quality, this is not practical when working remotely and it is best to transfer the scenes or assets locally to work on them with Harmony Standalone.

Producer - along with Producer Link and bundled Harmony Scripts - will play a key role in simplifying the process of retrieving a scene to work offline and sending it back to the Harmony Server.

In a remote configuration:

  • Harmony Server handles user requests for exporting/importing scenes and checking scenes in and out via WebCC.

  • WebCC handles all communication between Producer and Harmony Server. It responds to export requests from Producer by exporting compressed scenes to the users' outbound Exchange folder. It responds to import requests from Producer by monitoring the users' inbound exchange folder and importing the scene back to Harmony once received.

  • Producer Link handles all operations that need to be performed on the users local machines. It responds to Open Scene requests from Producer and maintains a list of already exported scenes. It takes care of monitoring incoming exported scenes, uncompressing and opening them in Harmony. It is also used to configure workspaces used by Producer Harmony Scripts.

  • Producer acts as a proxy between the remote user machine (via Producer Link and Harmony Scripts) and Harmony WebCC.

  • Harmony Client: when working remotely, Harmony will open exported scenes in offline mode, but those scenes will still be recognized as “offline database scenes”. Producer’s Harmony Scripts will offer additional options to upload the modified scene back to Harmony.

In addition, when working with assets, an assets library folder must also be shared between the studio and the user’s machine, so that templates (.tpl) may be saved and later retrieved.