Hi,
As I understand it, a copy of Draft will reside locally on a workstation if its slave has at some point processed a Draft job, as it copies down a local copy from the deadline repository before running the Draft job/task.
I have a user that wants to use Draft running locally to process some images, but I can’t guarantee a local path for him where Draft will reside as this machine may never have run a Draft job before!
Am I missing something obvious here as the docs imply Draft can be run outside of the Deadline environment and will just pull a flexlm license when required.
The only thing I can think of is the undocumented creation of a “python” directory on the repository and sync down a second copy of Draft into the local python directory on each deadline client. However, this seems a bit silly…
Thanks,
Mike
Hey Mike,
You are correct in your understand of the Draft synching stuff.
You can also use Draft outside of Deadline, as you mentioned, it should just be a matter of copying over the Draft binaries into a spot where Python can find it. If you want to always be in sync with the Draft version that’s in the repository, you’d really have to set that up manually (unless you do undocumented python synching stuff… does that even still work?).
Alternatively, you could just modify the Python path to include the network location in the repository, where the Draft binaries live. I’ve tried it before and that does work, but I can’t really speak to what kind of performance hit you’re taking when doing that (it might be super negligible, it might not be) as opposed to just loading it locally.
Cheers,
- Jon
ok, thanks Jon.
Could maybe Ryan answer if this still works in v6? I 'm about to start using the python sync repository > to local python path technology in v5.2 and I was kind of under the assumption that if it works as intended in v5.2, then it should continue to work as a feature in v6 in the future?
Jon/Ryan - Why can’t Draft just be part of the Deadline client installer? It doesn’t add that much to the installer size and you need a license to be able to run it, so you have to be on subs to grab a license. I just think this would make it so much more usable if I know for sure, that Draft exists on each client machine and I can use it for ad-hoc image processing.
Thanks,
Mike
So part of this is that we figured that most people who would be using Draft outside of Deadline would be using the system Python, instead of Deadline’s python. Just having it sit in a directory side-by-side with Deadline’s client folder seems kinda silly in that case, since you’d still need to do some additional legwork to get it working with your system’s Python anyways (either copy it elsewhere, or add that directory to the Python path).
Also, since we’re synching Draft with the Repo in the Slaves’ working folders, we didn’t want another version of Draft sitting where Deadline could potentially find it. That seems like asking for versioning troubles to me, since it suddenly gets real fuzzy as to which one you’re actually loading.
This has been removed in Deadline 6, and I really can’t see us adding this back now that we combine the client python folder with the bin folder.
Cheers,
- Ryan