About Palette Storage Locations

Palettes can also be stored in four different locations. The best location to store palettes depends on the type of production, the purpose of the palette, your pipeline and your backup plan. Here is an introduction to each type of palette location and their purpose:

• Element: The palette-library folder inside an element's folder in the scene. This is the recommended location if you are adding palettes to the palette lists of individual elements.
• Scene: The palette-library folder inside the scene's folder. This is the default location when creating a palette in the scene's palette list, and is the location chosen by Harmony when creating a palette with the Advanced palette Lists preference disabled. This is a suitable location to store the palettes of characters, props and backgrounds used in a single scene, a small project, or any production that uses Harmony Stand Alone.
• Job: For Harmony Server, this is the palette-library folder inside the job's folder on the database server. This is the recommended location if you want to share the same palette between several scenes in the same job, like for characters, props and backgrounds that are used in across entire episodes or smaller-scale projects.
• Environment: For Harmony Server, this is the palette-library folder inside the environment's folder on the database server. This is the recommended location if you want to share the same palette between several scenes in the same environment, like for characters, props and backgrounds that are used across an entire series or movie.

It is actually possible, but not recommended, to use palettes that are from a different job or environment. For example, if you wish to store a colour model's palette in the colour model's scene, you can make animation scenes that user this character link to the palette in the colour model's scene. However, this means your scene will depend on the colour model's scene and its palette being available at this location to render its colours. If the colour model's scene is moved or deleted, or if you export the animation scene and import it in another database, it will not be able to retrieve the palette. Hence, you would have to export the colour model along with the animated scene, and import it into the other database. If you were to store the colour model's palette in its element folder, this would have the same restriction, with the added risk of breaking links to the original palette if the character model's element is renamed. However, if you are sure that the structure of your Harmony database will remain static and available at all time and at all steps of your production, then you can store your palettes in whichever job or environment you see fit.

Another reason why it is better to store shared palettes in a scene's job or environment is because, when you export a Harmony scene, you can choose to export the palettes in the scene's job or environment palette libraries along with it. These palettes are then stored with the exported scene and, when importing the scene back into the database, you can choose to import the job and environment palettes that were exported with it back into the scene's job and environment.

Even in Harmony Stand Alone, you can store palettes at the job or environment level, even though Harmony Stand Alone scenes do not have a job or an environment. When you do this, palettes are stored inside a provisional jobs or environments directory inside the scene directory. If you import your scene to a Harmony Server database, you can choose to import the files located in that scene's provisional job and environment into the scene's job and environment. Hence, when using Harmony Stand Alone, you should only store palettes at the job or environment level if you intend to import your scene in a database later.