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Quick Start

▶Video tutorial — coming soon

A first scene, from an empty Node View to an assembled hierarchy. Ten minutes, and nothing is written to Harmony until the last step.

1. Set up your destinations

In the Browser, find the Magnets section and press +. Create the destinations your show uses:

Magnet Name Aliases
BACKGROUND bg, backgrounds
CHARACTER char, characters
PROPS prop
EFFECTS fx

You do this once. From now on a folder called bg lands under BACKGROUND by itself, in every scene.

Then press Generate Magnet Tree (Ctrl+M) in the Staging toolbar. The four destinations appear, each already a super node:

The generated destinations

2. Bring artwork in

Navigate to your delivery folder and drag it into Staging.

What happens on the way in:

  • subfolders become branches,
  • numbered files collapse into sequences with their frame range detected,
  • folder names are read for tags,
  • anything matching a magnet is routed to its destination.

Read the Details column. It already tells you what will be built:

Can          Seq: 1-840     (Peg > Read > Comp)

3. Shape it

Select a row and use the Inspector.

Tick a component to add it — Peg, Group, Composite, Backdrop. Or press the shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+P attaches a peg to the selection, Ctrl+Shift+N attaches the whole set.

Aim the artwork. On a drawing, set Target Layer to the art layer the artwork belongs on — or tag it at the source next time (line=LA).

Add an effect. Ctrl+1 for Transparency, Ctrl+4 for Glow. The chain order is the wiring order.

The fastest edit is the one you don't make

Everything in this step can be written into the file names before the import. head=P-G-C in Photoshop is three nodes you never had to tick. See Tags.

4. Check the frames

Expand a drawing to see its Frames folder. The Range column reports the truth:

Shows Means
Seq: 1-840 continuous
Seq: 1-12, 20-24 a gap — worth knowing about now, not at render
Empty no artwork yet

Hide them all with the toggle when you go back to structure.

5. Assemble

Press Assemble.

If the button is grey, the feedback bar is showing a red blocker — that bar is the answer to why.

OSA creates every node, connects both hierarchies, writes the attributes, imports the artwork, and lays the graph out on the Wide Bus grid.

Then read the report. It lists what the scene refused, not what it did:

Mark Means
FALHA asked for and did not happen
nota happened, just not the way it was asked

Silence is the good outcome.