As of Deadline 10.1.23.6, Draft no longer requires a license. The floating license portal on AWS does not provide Draft licenses to the license files.
You are encouraged to upgrade to the latest versions of the products to leverage the new features. The latest build of Deadline (10.2.1.1) also fixes the issue with Draft skipping frames while encoding with H264 codec.
Note : The H264 encoding fixes are only patched for the Draft v1.8.0 – latest. You would need to be on Deadline 10.1.23.6 or latest if using H264 for better encoding quality. The older version of Deadline would be able to run Draft but it does not resolve the issues with Draft such as Draft skipping frames and producing unexpected output.
However, if you prefer to stay with an existing version, you can follow the below steps to patch Deadline to run Draft at no charge. You would need to replace the existing files with the ones from the download link below. Here’s how:
Create a backup of the old draft binaries and place it elsewhere in case there is a need to roll back the change:
Download the free version of Draft using this link. Unzip the download to the DeadlineRepository10 directory. Make sure that the new files appear here:
Even after updating the draft folders in our repo, we are still getting varied frame rate outputs. Our AE comps are quite large but we are saving H264 down to 1/4res which works, but we still get frame rates between 15fps and 25fps.
I had tried the custom script set to 24000kbitrate but had the same issue until I set the kbitrate to 450000.
The framerate fix wasn’t in the package we put up on Friday - but it’s in the package I just uploaded a moment ago. Grab the files again and restart the Worker to force it to pull a fresh cache and you should be good.
I have a uploaded the Draft free package again to the forum thread above, as found that the files for Draft we broken and loading the python3.7 dependencies. Now it should be fine.
If you run into any issues with it, feel free to reach out to Thinkbox Support
@karpreet@Justin_B ^^^ We’re having the same issue. It’s debilitating. Going to contact support about it, but wanted to confirm @MarcoA 's claim. I did talk to support and the solution was to just modify the kbps, but it doesn’t matter how much I crank it up, it doesn’t get back to the quality that it was before (I did start with normal values, such as 8000 kbps, the recommended rate for 1080 HD).
