Hi @Antoonyx!

Thank you for your question — we are happy to help answer your questions. In full transparency, you are going to get a biased answer as to which software you should use as you’re on the Dataclay forums 😇 !

First, I would recommend Adobe After Effects to build our your master, dynamic, template. You can achieve that with Templater Rig. When you outfit an AE project to accept dynamic data using Templater, the resultant project is what is known as an “Autograf”. This project file can be linked to a variety of data sources, but a spreadsheet, such as a Google Sheet, is an easy one to use for starters. Each row in the sheets represents a new output video to be rendered, while each column in the sheet refers to the dynamic items (i.e. layers) within the After Effects compositions.

As you design and build your Autograf, you link Templater to a footage repository containing the footage you want to use for each output. Then, in the data, you write a relative path from that footage repository to where the footage actually exists. The best part is that the footage does not necessarily even have to be on the same machine that AE is running on. In the linked datasource, you can use URLs and when Templater reads that URL it will attempt to download the footage locally to that drive. In your case, you can keep sub folders within the main footage repository so that each video’s contents are separated. Then, in the data source, you can enter the subfolder path to the assets.

Dataclay customers are achieving the bulk production and automation you are currently seeking. Templater for After Effects can re-version master After Effects projects into still images and videos.

To get a comprehensive overview of the software and workflow, please take a look at this video which just scratches the surface of what’s possible with Templater Rig, Pro, and Bot.

Templater by Arie Stavchansky | Plugin Demo | Adobe Creative Cloud

@Jeff After not having any success with the expression I posted, I actually did what you suggested, using an expression to change the source text for each layer, adding in the dynamic text. I just didn’t think of using an Animator for the faux italics, so I had just resigned myself to keeping the font the same. I appreciate your ideas, and I’ll give them a try soon. Thanks!

@Jon Sorry for the late reply.
Yes, I got everything working with Jeff’s advice and your tips.
Big thanks for the help.

@dave

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to change a text layer to a footage layer dynamically in After Effects. From what I can see, this appears to be due to the fact that AE sets each layer’s type when it’s first created, and text layers seem to be using an entirely different logic engine than footage layers.

If I understand the scenario that you’re describing and you’re using Google Sheets, our best bet might be to use some Sheets formulas to turn “First Last - usa.png” into two cells that contain “First Last” and “usa.png”. That would be data that would be more useable for Templater since the “usa.png” value could be set to refer to footage, and the “First Last” input could be added to a corresponding text layer.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please let us know, and we’ll see what we can do.

Thanks,

Jeff

@Jeff That is awesome! Thank you!

Worked like a charm

@Jeff

Thanks for the info.

I’m familiar with expressions, but far from an expert.

We’ll see how this goes. I’ll circle back either way.

-josh

@jeff YESS, that worked!! 🙂 Thank you so much.

@turnerryan Glad to hear that worked!

@citizensam interesting solution! We would love to see the transcription/captioning panel from Premiere come to AE, as dealing with subtitles in AE has always been less than ideal. Burn-in shouldn’t be the only option—sidecar files and embedded subtitle streams need to be added. I would recommend searching the Adobe forums to see if there’s already a feature request related to it, or making a new one if there isn’t. Ideally, AE should be able to handle SRT, VTT, and other common formats as inputs, as well as industry-standard outputting.

@jeff That makes sense. And unfortunately the aspect ratio is different for all the sizes, so it’s not as simple as just scaling the video.

I’m going to make another post to see if anyone here uses Coda.io to generate JSON files. We use Coda with our client to submit project requests, so I’m thinking I may be able to make a document with that service to make a JSON file with all the variations.

Thanks again for your help.

@jeff Thanks for the reply, Jeff.

@ben-forman said in Best Way to Template Subtitle Track:

@jon said in Best Way to Template Subtitle Track:

So the line endings on Mac might work best as CR (rather than CRLF or LF). Sublime should let you change the line endings, too.

Can you clarify what this means? Am I changing characters? Changing encodings?

LF, CR, and CRLF are platform-specific “line-endings”—they tell the OS where a given line of text or code ends and a new one starts. The behavior where it was displaying all of the subtitle text at once is because AE and the OS aren’t correctly interpreting where each line ends.

UTF-8 is a text character encoding—numerical representations of a graphical character/shape. There are also others like ASCII, UTF-16.

The files in the GitHub repo are already UTF-8. When I created them on Windows, the files had CRLF line endings, but git automatically converted them to LF line endings upon uploading.

I am on Windows and an older version of Sublime, but this is what it looks like on my menu. Save after changing.

16d599cd-5194-4739-9b26-e6bd1e38e708-image.png

@pbretz

It can depend quite a bit on how your systems are configured, but I’ll try and outline the basics here. To run Event Scripts, the first thing you’ll need is a copy of Templater Bot. Event Scripts are only available on this version of Templater, so if you’re using Pro or Rig, this won’t be an option.

Once you’ve got Bot set up, head to the Templater Preferences window and click on “Setup ExtendScripts”. From there, you should get a box that will allow you to choose which Templater event you’d like to use to trigger the Event Script.

When I tested the script outlined above, I registered it on the “After layers update” event under “Layer Processing”. This instructs the script to run after any data versioning and Time Sculpting have been applied to the project.

If you’re running Templater via CLI, you’ll want to specify the script you’d like to run in the templater-options.json file on the appropriate Event. In this case, you’d want to add it to the “post_cmd_update” event.

Those are the basics, but more information can be found in this article from our support website. Additionally, we have some example scripts on our GitHub Page located here.

If you run into any hurdles or if we can answer any questions, just let us know!

Thanks!

@motion-jp

Glad to hear it! My guess is that something went wrong when the previous project was imported, and an asset was incorrectly reported as a JPEG sequence instead of a static image file. It’s possible that AE then cached that asset state, so every time the file was loaded, AE saw it as a sequence regardless of whether it was previously removed or not.

We haven’t seen that particular scenario before, but it’s good to hear that you were able to get it resolved. If you run into any additional problems, please feel free to get in touch.

Thanks!

@unclemonty

It seems like you’ve already found a solution, but I wanted to chime in and say that it should, theoretically, be possible to map the same value to both a footage and text layer simultaneously. In this case, the footage layer should be swapped out, and the text layer should be replaced with the filename present in the cell.

As you noted, you’d need to use an expression to strip out any subfolder information or file extensions, but from a theoretical standpoint, it should work.

If you have any other questions or run into any problems, let us know, and we’ll do whatever we can to get you up and running.

Thanks!

@joevac

Thanks for getting in touch with us. This issue most commonly occurs when a value besides {{off}}, {{on}}, or a valid precomp name is referenced in the Data Source for the project. What typically happens is that Templater tries to reference the value in the Data Source and map it onto the precomp layer as either text or as a footage reference. This is what is causing the pre-comp to turn into an image when cycling through the rows. The first thing I’d try is to check and see if you have anything besides {{off}} or {{on}} in your Google Sheet if you’re primarily using Templater to control layer visibility.

Hopefully, that’s all it is, but if that doesn’t change anything or you have any further questions, please feel free to let us know. Thanks, and happy rendering!

@lucarech

Templater can absolutely handle all of those sorts of assets! In fact, swapping out text is our plugin’s most common use case. Videos and music can also be swapped in as long as they’re in a format that After Effects can read. I’d recommend taking a look at the tutorial videos on our Youtube channel as well as the documentation on our support website for further details.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know.

Thanks!

@pbretz

It’s relatively similar but actually a bit easier with Shape Layers. Since Shape Layers intrinsically have a “Color” property under the “Fill” section, there’s no need to add a Fill Effect to the layer. You can simply add the Expression directly to the “Color” value.

Adobe has also added a more streamlined Expression that can convert hex codes to the RGB values needed to determine a layer’s color. This Expression:

hexToRgb(""+thisComp.layer("layername").text.sourceText+"")

should perform the same function as the Expression referenced in the previous post. The layername value will need to be swapped out for the name of the text layer with the hex information you’d like to use for the fill. Other than that, it should work the same.

Let us know if you run into any issues, and we’ll see what we can do to help.

Thanks!