@eliasnilsson19 How are you locally accessing the files uploaded to the Google Form? Are they being synced back to your computer via Google Drive (File Stream or Backup and Sync)? You would need to build a formula in your Sheet that transposes and concatenates a local file path based on the original file name of the file being uploaded-- the generated URLs for Google Drive are not absolute links, so Templater will fail to download them correctly (Templater can download URLs that are absolute links to the files, ending with a file extension). I’m not certain whether it is possible to get just the filename of the uploaded file via Google Forms, but if it is, that is how you would have to approach it. Outside of that, you’d have to look at a different form builder that can handle the requirement of uploading the file and pushing the absolute URL back into your Sheet. I know that it is possible to do with JotForm, if configured correctly.

@danoakes & @rikpare Apologies for the late response, but this is most likely happening if the image URLs don’t point directly to the file (such as a file with URL arguments or one that loads a webpage instead of the file directly-- Dropbox and Google Drive links are examples), if they don’t have a file extension in the URL, or if they are password protected. You can test the URL by opening a private browser window and pasting the URL into the address bar. If the file doesn’t load, it’s probably set to be private. If it loads in a frame (such as with Dropbox and Google Drive), then the URL won’t work. If it’s a matter of the link missing a file extension, if you add the correct file extension to the downloaded file, it will import, as the file is not corrupt, but it’s that After Effects depends upon the file extension to import a file. Any file without a file extension will not import into After Effects.

Hi there!

How is the file referenced in your data source? And, is the file on a cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive?

To be sure the reference must be a direct download and not protected by some kind of sharing service where the actual link might be different from the actual file itself. Further, the reference must contain a file extension for AE to be able to interpret it.

We are working on a method to support Dropbox and other sync services like google Drive, but S3 links are supported.

Does this help?

@rivalpro Unfortunately, what you are encountering here is a known issue with using Bot and Google Sheets. Can you somehow, make an invisible field that does the “stitching” of the other fields in the form and inject that invisible field into the Google Sheet. In other words, the output column should be hard coded. I know this is not what you want to hear, but it is a limitation of writing data back to a Google Sheet using their API.

Also, after first download and import on empty placeholder, after that if I change the link to the image, it wont download it again, I need to put new empty placeholder to download new image. Is it possible to fix that in some way ?

Hi there! Yes we have confirmed this as a bug manifested in the 2.7.0 release. It comes up when you invoke the “Preview” task, but have no specified target composition. We have implemented a fix, but for now, the workaround is to be sure you’ve specified a target composition in any of the three methods. Please read this knowledge base article about specifying a target composition with Templater.

Thanks,
Arie

@BusterCherry Apologies for the late reply on this. We don’t have this feature currently implemented, but we do intend implement a similar design that you’ve proposed.

The Templater Settings effect should have an additional parameter that is perhaps labeled something such as “Fallback Target Layer”. This param would essentially allow a user to specify different ways to “search” for a layer target if the one selected is not enabled / visible.

We have this in our queue for feature improvements and your post validates our need to have this in there.

In the meantime, you might be able to use an “invisible” video of varying lengths that can act as a proxy to what you want (i.e. a layer shifting in the timeline a certain amount of seconds / frames depending on your re-versioning data).

Please let us know if this helps or if we can provide more clarification.

Many thanks again for your patience!

Best,
Arie

Thanks for the question, and welcome to our forum. Templater needs a reference to the actual asset file, as opposed to some URL hash that Google Forms creates. It is likely that you could get the reference to the uploaded asset after submitting the form. If you can write custom code to retrieve the actual URL and the insert it into the same row, that should work. We do plan on supporting hashed URLs for footage asset refs. I apologize for the disappointing info here, but there may be a third party Forms plugin that might let you get the actual URL reference to the asset.

Please let us know if you have further questions!

Thanks again for coming to the forum to post! Shared knowledge is good knowledge 🙂