@mantas

Thanks for getting in touch with us. The behavior you describe is generally caused by a layer that isn’t renamed before Templater swaps in the data. If you take a look at the Layer Name, when you add the asset to your Layer Stack, you’ll see that it’s surrounded in brackets. This indicates that the layer name is temporary, so when the asset gets swapped in, it renames the layer. To fix this, simply rename the layer before applying the Templater Effect to remove the brackets. This should keep the layer from being renamed when the asset is swapped. Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any more questions, please feel free to let us know.

Thanks!

@tasnadi-otto

OK. I think this will work for what you’re trying to do:

var compName = $D.job.get("compname"); var layerName = $D.job.get("layername"); var layerTime = $D.job.get("time"); var myComp; for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i ++) { if ((app.project.item(i) instanceof CompItem) && (app.project.item(i).name === compName)) { myComp = app.project.item(i); break; } } myComp.layer(layerName).startTime = layerTime;

I’ll explain the methodology briefly here so that you can adjust as needed. The comp name is set by the “compname” field in the data source (more on that in a second), the layer by “layername”, the time value by “time”. These values can obviously be altered to fit your project as needed.

The code that begins with var myComp; is essentially a quick loop that searches your Project for the text outlined in the compName variable and returns the index value. That way, you can pick the comp using plain text rather than an index. The layer name within the comp can be designated by text, so that’s what the layerName variable is for.

I tested this on the “Before layers update” event, and it seemed to work without an issue. It’s possible there might be some issues if you have a huge number of layers that all need updating, but this should be a good starting point. If you run into trouble, feel free to let us know, and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks!

@cristian

Thanks for the update. Are the new comps being created when you preview the next row in your data set? Or is this happening when you hit the “replicate” button in Templater? Templater won’t typically create new precomps when swapping between assets, so we need to narrow down how exactly this project is laid out.

Could you outline the steps one by one that led to the behavior that you’re seeing? Hopefully, that’ll give us a better picture of what exactly is happening. You can also get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com if you’d like to share these details in a more direct message.

Let us know what you can, and we’ll take it from there. Thanks!

@ben-forman This may be possible (or close to it) with some really hacky math-based expressions, but I haven’t been able to figure it out getting it working within a project in the immediate term. The way that the loopOut() expression works (requiring two keyframes) interferes with the way that time remapping would need to function in the context of Templater’s Time Sculpting and layer-swapping logic-- using only one Time Remapping keyframe at the beginning of the layer (to accommodate for the unknown variable duration of each video-- if there is a second keyframe, it won’t adapt to the full duration of the source footage). Since you don’t know how many loops may be necessary, that adds another layer of complication, and then there is the circular way that the durations of each will need to reference each other-- it’s pretty intense logic. Using the techniques I’ve tried, you’d either have to choose between playing the full “loop” only once, and you could maybe loop it infinitely for the duration of the layer, but you still run into the issue of setting the out point of the video layer itself, which is not something that expressions can do.

This is likely in the realm of writing an ExtendScript function that can look at the source duration of each video, compare it to the duration of the source of the audio, enable time remapping, set the in/out point of each video to dur x loops, then set the start and end of the containing comp to match the layer duration of the time-remapped video.

Now, it may be that this is the kind of thing that can be hacked together and largely handled through the data. For example, if you knew the frame-exact durations of each, you could specifically pre-define variant comps that loop x number of times, then comp swap each into your target depending on how many loops you need. If you have precomps like vid-loops-1, vid-loops-2, etc., you could then set a value in the data to swap the comps as if they were footage, too, (by defining them with {{<comp-name>}} in the data) then there’s no messing with time-remapping-- only Time Sculpting. There could even be another ExtendScript approach that would expand on/automate this idea, where it’s doing those comparison calculations within a function, then swapping between the pre-comps for the variant with the appropriate number of loops.

I stumbled on the issue, in case others find themselves in a similar situation:

I had a layer with the Templater effect that was thrown outside its comp’s timeline. Whether this was a result of user error, or I had deleted a layer and forgot to update the effect settings, I am not sure.

Once I found the culprit layer, I deleted it, re-created the layer, and re-applying the Templater effect. This caused it to behave normally again.

I wish I knew the cause of the issue that made the layer appear outside of the comp’s timeline so I could avoid it in the future. But, for now, this gives me something to look out for in case the issue pops up again.

Wow - can’t wait to try this!

@Ben-Forman

While Templater is able to use links to MP3 and MP4 files, the URL syntax requirements are very specific. Many web pages will use html to redirect requests to specific files, which can interfere with the ability to use remote assets in AE. Can you provide an example of the sort of URL you’re using? Appropriately formatted URL’s will generally end in with the filename of the file you’re looking to get, ie:

https://download.samplelib.com/mp4/sample-10s.mp4

Let us take a look at the sort of URL you’re using, and we should be able to point you in the right direction. Thanks!

@Tasnadi-Otto Is the precomp exactly square? If it is, if you add 1 px to the width of the precomp, does that resolve the issue?

There was a bug in older versions of Templater in the way that crop and fill were calculating depending upon whether or not the source footage was portrait, landscape, or square, as well as whether or not the precomp was portrait, square, or landscape, The scaling bug is fixed in 2.9.6. In 2.9.6, it should behave correctly regardless of which orientation the footage or source are, and you also wouldn’t need to add the extra 1px for square comps.

@johnsyounger Good to hear it’s working. Yeah, we have done some tests with Mr. Horse’s Animation Composer and have found that you have to dig deep into the comps that it creates and apply the Templater Settings effect to the layers that actually contain the text you want Templater to update. Hope this helps!

I´ve solved the problem. It works when i fill the cell for the visible Layer with {{on}} and don´t leave it blank like in the tutorial. I didn´t find that in the documentation, maybe it should be added.

Hi There!

Because you want to stack the layers, and then vertically center the stack, you may need to create a pre-composition of the three layers. Then, in the composition you have showed in your demo, you will want to align the “triple text layer pre-comp” to the right edge of the guide layer.

Please let us know if this helps!

@rdbs

I apologize; my last response was a bit garbled. Templater Rig should be able to use the same Time Sculpting features as Pro and Bot. Those options would probably be your best bet when it comes to customizing the comp duration. Let us know if you have any further questions. Thanks!

@Valery-IV

I sent a more detailed response to the message you sent to our support channel, but I will leave a more general response to this inquiry here.

Basically, what you’re attempting to achieve isn’t entirely possible using the default Templater layout rules. Templater requires an “anchor” object to center other items on, so having the two attached pieces of text is going to result in some layout discrepancies depending on the length of the price and currency items, respectively.

You can achieve something similar to the pictures you’ve attached by combining the two text items and using a series of Text Animators to adjust each word’s size and placement. Or, you could use a third-party plugin like Text Chain to control each part of the text individually. Since Templater can center and adjust a single text object, this should allow you to achieve the sort of effect you’re looking for. If you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know.

@Oliver This can also be solved with an expression. Take a look at this post.

@yansfeld

If I understand your description correctly, I think you could achieve this result by pre-composing all of the animated layers and then applying Templater to the pre-comp to center the result. If that doesn’t work, let us know, and we’ll see what else we can come up with. Thanks!

Oh yeah that should work. I’ll give it a try! Thanks