arkennemasis fal · Seedance 2.5 Draft to 1080p · $1.16/s

Seedance has the most uncomfortable price in this whole category, and it's worth stating flat: at 1080p, finishing a draft runs roughly $1.16 per second. A six-second shot is about seven dollars. This is the number that made people angry when Seedance arrived in ComfyUI, and the KB quotes the reaction - "extremely expensive", a really small number of videos per month - along with the reply that this is simply "the real price of these renders" after years of subsidised pricing.

So this node is not a toy. It's the second half of a two-stage workflow whose entire justification is not paying that rate for a take you were going to reject.

What it does

ArkFal_bytedance_seedance_2_5_draft_complete takes a draft_id - the one returned by a Seedance node run with draft enabled - and regenerates that task at 1080p. You previewed at 480p for the cheap rate; this is the commit.

Two required inputs:

• draft_id - the id string from the draft run. Valid for seven days, and only for the original caller. Both halves of that matter: let a week go by and the draft is dead, and if you finish it with a different fal key (a different account, a colleague's env file) it won't resolve. Same machine, same FAL_KEY, within the week.
• codec - auto (default), H264 or H265. auto keeps fal's default encoding behaviour; force H.265 if you care about file size, H.264 if you care about everything playing nicely with older NLEs.

Then the shared optional row: max_cost_usd (default $20 - and on this node, seriously consider lowering it, because a 30-second completion is over $30 and the check happens before anything is submitted), reuse_identical_run (on by default), extra_json, max_concurrent.

Outputs: video, video_path, seed, and draft_id echoed back, plus info with the request id, estimate and fal's full answer.

Why draft-then-finish is worth the extra step

The draft runs at 480p for about $0.22 per second - a fifth of the 1080p rate, because the endpoint bills in tokens computed from resolution and duration rather than a flat second. The mechanics of a draft are the same shot: same prompt, same references, same motion. You're just watching it small.

For a 10-second clip that's roughly $2.20 to look, versus $11.60 to look and deliver. Two drafts plus one finish beats two full renders at the cheap rate by a wide margin, and it's the only reason this pricing is defensible for anyone not on a company card.

ByteDance is the lab the KB calls the sharpest two-track operation in the space - accelerators and research derivatives out free, every flagship generator API-only, Seedance included. That's why there's no local substitute to fall back on. Nothing here is downloadable at any VRAM.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Hishamahmer/comfyui-arkennemasis

Restart ComfyUI, or install via ComfyUI Manager (search arkennemasis). Then:

FAL_KEY=your-key-from-fal.ai/dashboard/keys

in the .env sitting next to run_nvidia_gpu.bat (portable build) or in your ComfyUI folder. There's no key field on the node - the pack keeps credentials out of workflow JSON on purpose - and nothing to download.

Where people get burned

Pasting a draft_id from an older session and getting a cryptic failure: it's expired, or it belongs to a different key. Both are silent-ish errors from fal's side rather than something the node can check for you.

Assuming a draft is a cheap re-roll. It isn't a re-render of the same random seed at small size - it's a preview, and completing it is the render you'll keep or throw away. And once it's finished, reuse_identical_run will hand the same file back for free on a repeat run, so the expensive click is at least not an easily-repeatable mistake.

Results land in output/fal/bytedance_seedance-2.5_draft_complete/; every request is logged to output/fal/_requests.jsonl, which is also where the request id lives if ComfyUI restarts mid-render and you want fal Recover Result to fetch the finished job for free.