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 modules 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 tape 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.
You cannot archive a job by deleting the job. If you want to archive a job, you should export it to a new location where it can be stored permanently.

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.

You cannot delete a job if it still contains scenes.