I am currently debating with myself about the value of having a preview window for Draft. This would allow you to view output directly from executing the Draft script which I think will make making templates a smoother process. You could even have it set up to run from the interpreter (thought that may be bit a unwieldy). While Draft won’t have an interface (until some future release…) this might be give a bit of interactivity and save having to go to some image viewer to see the output.
How important would this be to you Draft users? (1-5)
How important is h264 codec support?
What missing features are there?
Preview Window: 4 <- gets less and less important the closer I am to finishing but would have been a huge time saver and encourage more people to actually use it.
h264: 10
Missing Features (I’ll add as I think of them):
Correct Gamma for h264s (Just assuming this will be broken).
Quicktime “Fast Start”
Easy system to have one studio “Template” that has user options. Like “Size” and checkboxes for deliverables ([]Simian, [] Internal 720p, []NTSC)
AVI/Uncompressed MOV input instead of frame sequences? Haven’t tried yet.
Consistent UI in Deadline so that it pulls the template off the Repository without forcing users to browse to a python file.
An ages old thread…however thinking more about this issue recently…
I think what is really required here Ian; is actually an IDE connection for Deadline scripting which also has Draft scripting built-in and this IDE connection also includes a preview window for Draft.
Obviously you would get more coverage with a Open Source based plugin/connection that worked with something like Eclipse IDE, however, it may be easier for you guys to build a Visual Studio based plugin/extension, although this might require end-users to have at least licensed VS Pro and not express? Not sure, would have to check on this one. (I’m thinking of the license issue which stops VS express users from using the IronPython VS extension completely.)
Mike
A good time to revive the thread! We are starting to wind down the first release of draft, but we are making some plans for the future with how we want to handle a GUI and what sort of scripting control is demanded. For example, we could make an GUI that creates a python script that is executed in an external process, or we could do something more integrated with the interface being much more live. If we had an IDE as a part of that as well, it would be fairly useful though I am not sure much scripting would be needed with a GUI in place to create the base script.
Certainly some users would expand on the draft script to include all sorts of other things (posting clips to an ftp for example) but they may want to work outside of the Draft UI anyways in their favourite Python IDE.
Both would be useful. It would be nice to have a quick visual way to generate code snippets and then paste them into larger plugins and wrap them in frosting.
