what is a proper setting when exporting images from harmony? (multiple,general questions!)

Harmony Harmony General Discussion
1

Hello, I’ve been using Toon boom Harmony to make an animated film. Since this is my first time using Toon boom Harmony, it’s not easy to figure out stuff.

Now I have a very last step of my film which is editing. To do that, I planned to export images from toon boom project and import them into After effect.
Here is my question. What’s a proper setting when you export images from toon boom?

I used psd4 and Tga4 from open GL, but that wouldn’t transparent the background and the size tended to came out smaller than the 1920x1080 ration I’ve set on
toon boon scene setting.

So I tried other way, used psd from image exporting window and used 16bit option. I thought 8bit could come out with bad resolution on the image…?
This way I tried made the background transparent, and the size also fit to 1920x 1080. But, the size of a single image file would go over 16mb each that ended up
taking 50gb of my computer storage just for one minute length of animated images. So I guess 8bit is enough to make a proper animation image …? am I right?

I’m such a beginner on making animation and it gives me a hard time dealing with computer programs and such. Please help!

I’m in middle of a crunch time that the deadline of my animation project is in a weekm, so my questions might sound really unorganized. I apologized about that and
thanks for reading my question.

Thank you

2

Hi

Harmony always exports 16-bits per channel.
Depending on which image format, you can have either 8 bit (ex, TGA, PSD, TGA, PNG) per channel or 16 bit - double precision (PSDDP, PNGDP).
Depending on which Edition you use, the option including alpha will be different but since you are mentioning Tga4, I assume you are using a Premium.
Regardless of which format you use to export, the OpenGL Frames will not be the right option for the final since this option is more designed to export for quick preview since it does not contain any effect. For Premium, proper export will be File>Export>Render Write nodes.

If you want to export it with alpha channel, any format with 4 after will include the alpha. Harmony premultiplies with black for the alpha channel that when you are importing it to AE, you need to make sure to select the transparency as ‘black’.

The 16-bit (DP) will take much longer to render (also more change to crash if there is lack of hardware resources) and will be bigger in the file size so you need to do a proper test if it is required for example, if you have a lot of the gradient that there is a lot of distorted color blending, you may want to consider testing 16-bit channel rendering.

I hope this helps