@UncleMonty

Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s not really a way to “freeze” assets in a project file in the way that you’re describing. This is mainly caused by limitations in After Effects, where third-party plugins like Templater aren’t provided with a list of what assets are needed for each render action.

However, one suggestion that might help would be to break the project file up into individual aep files and then use Templater’s aep Reserved Column to switch between projects as necessary.

This method has the advantage of keeping each file relatively small and streamlined, so Templater doesn’t have to swap out layers that are potentially redundant. However, if the file contains a large number of potential target compositions, it can sometimes be more trouble than it’s worth.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have further questions or issues, please don’t hesitate to let us know here or through our main support channel at support@dataclay.com, and we’ll be more than happy to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@best

After taking a look at these screenshots, I believe that the issue here has to do with the fact that the first few cells in the “animation-path-mongolian-chr” layer are blank.

If we take a look in the Templater Preferences window under the “Footage” subsection, we can see an option that reads “consider empty cells or null values as faulty”. If that option is checked, Templater will consider any empty cell in the Data Source to be a fault and will perform the option chosen in the “When Templater cannot find or import referenced footage…” drop-down. If that option is set to “use my branded placeholder”, it would explain what we’re seeing here.

To get around this, we could try a few different things. First, we could uncheck the “Consider empty cells or null values as faulty” option. This would certainly work in the short term, however, it would leave Templater open to faults if a future Sheet had blank values that needed to be treated as faulty.

The other option would be to populate the blank cells with a value that Templater can read. In this case, we could use Templater’s “Comp Swapping” feature to reference the comps that are already being used.

To do this, we’d need to rename the “animation-path-mongolian-chr” and “animation-path-japanese-chr” layers to something else. Then, we could fill in the blank spaces with the renamed comp names surrounded by either double curly braces or double brackets. That would give Templater something to load when the values weren’t set to {{off}}. This soultion is a bit more complex, but it should help to keep the project more stable in the long run.

Hopefully, that all makes sense, but if you have any questions, please feel free to post them here or email us at support@dataclay.com.

Thanks,

Jeff

@LukasCuprzynski To add to what Arie is saying, if only one of the five precomps are going to be visible at once, you can use a flag to switch the precomps out entirely, as if they were any other piece of pre-rendered footage, rather than having to individually tag each comp with {{off}} flags for each output. This video demonstrates the comp switching technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEIg7mOR3iA

@lorenzodossi No problem, and happy rendering!

@pbretz make sure you are not making any modifications to Templater effect settings, which might be related to source modifications on layers. Thus, lets say you copied effect from layer X, which had a visual source.

Thus, easiest to make sure it did not happened - delete and add effect again to audio.

@JakeLumbis

That should absolutely be possible! I’d recommend reviewing this post for some additional information, but basically, this is how we’d go about it.

First, we’d want to create two new text layers named “LRW rStart” and “LRW rEnd” (with no quotes). Once we’ve got these layers in our project and we’re sure that they’re bringing in the values we want, we should be able to move on to the next step.

From there, we’ll want to add an Animator to the text layer we want to change; I’d recommend “Stroke Color”. However, we’ll also need to click the “Add” button and add the “Stroke Width” and “Stroke Color>Opacity” properties. We’ll also want to adjust the “Stroke Width” and “Stroke Color” layers to create the Faux Bold effect. After that, we’ll want to expand the “Range Selector 1” property and drill down to the “Advanced” section.

In that area, we’ll want to set “Units” to “Index” and “Based On” to “Words”. Finally, we’ll want to go back to the “Start” and “End” values of the “Range Selector 1”. Alt/Option-click on the Stopwatch to the left of the word “Start”. This should open the Expression editor. For the “Start” Expression, we’ll want to reference the “LRW rStart” layer’s value. So, for that, we would use:

text.animator("Animator 1").selector("Range Selector 1").start,parseInt(thisComp.layer("LRW rStart").text.sourceText)-1

for the “End” value, we’ll want a similar expression that references our “End” number:

text.animator("Animator 1").selector("Range Selector 1").end,parseInt(thisComp.layer("LRW rEnd").text.sourceText)

That should, in theory, work for what you’re trying to achieve. However, depending on the format of the text, it might take some tweaking. For example, in the screenshot provided, it looks like the text is formatted in a single block, which might require us to make our calculations by the number of characters rather than the number of words.

Either way that should be enough to get you started. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.

Thanks,

Jeff

@JakeLumbis Glad you got it resolved! Yes, any errors in the project like missing footage or fonts will cause that kind of issue. In my experience, that is the most common reason to see Failed at N/A.

@chris-czech

While Templater can import and swap PSD files in the same fashion as other image formats, unfortunately, there’s not currently a mechanism in place to import specific layers during that process.

I’ll go ahead and put in a feature request with our developers to take a look and see if there’s a way that we can offer that functionality in the future, but even if it’s possible, it would likely take some time to implement into Templater.

If we get any updates on that request, I’ll go ahead and update this thread in the future, but for right now, we’ll need to separate the layers into different source files if we want to bring in specific assets individually.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@Jeff Thank you. That helps immensely. I was on a trial version

@jbenton42

Hello, hope you’re doing well. We’ve seen the sort of behavior you’re describing here before, and it generally comes from a logic problem with the setup of the Time Sculpting layers. It’s a bit difficult to explain, but usually, the issue comes from a layer that’s dependent on the logic of another layer that, in turn, doesn’t adjust properly.

To resolve this, the first thing that I would recommend would be to ensure that the system in question is running the latest version of Templater. We’ve made some recent adjustments to the Time Sculpting logic in the latest version of the plugin to specifically address the type of issues that are being described here.

If installing the latest version doesn’t make a difference, there are some additional troubleshooting techniques that we could recommend, but they tend to be a bit tedious, so if we can solve the issue with the updated Time Sculpting logic, that would be ideal.

Let’s start there and if the issue persists, we can consider what other troubleshooting steps we might take to get this issue resolved.

Thanks,

Jeff

Hi @nswedlund — you can accomplish this with spot checking. Essentially, you setup named markers on your target composition timeline, and then use “Spot Check” to output still images. By default, Templater renders with the Photoshop output module that ships with AE. If you need PNG images, you will need to load the PNG sequence module in Templater’s Spot Checking preferences tab.

There is more technical, step-by-step information at Templater’s documentation, but you can see a short demo of it in this video (at 5:09 into playback):

Templater by Arie Stavchansky | Plugin Demo | Adobe Creative Cloud

You don’t have to use Spot Checking, though. You can set Templater’s output module to PNG Sequence, make your target composition a single frame duration, and then have render a single frame. In this case, your data would need to have an output property value padded with hashtag symbols. So, your output names would need to looks something line myVideoA_#####, myVideoB_####, … , myVideoZ_####

Please let us know if this helps.

Thanks!

@Jeff
Thanks for getting back to me. I will investigate Event script. If only overlap in Templater time shift feathre could be adjusted with an expression in AE that would probably solve it…
Will figure something out

thanks once again

best

v.

@1337err

Hmmm, this one is a bit tricky. If I understand correctly, the proposed scenario is one where the audio layer is stretched if it’s shorter than the video layer, but if it’s longer, it’s not.

Assuming that’s the case, I think, theoretically, it could be done, but we’d need to go one step beyond Expressions and use Templater Bot’s Event Scripts function to use some ExtendScript to evaluate the length of the two layers and update Templater as needed.

To start, I’d set up two different master comps. One that has Time Sculpting set up for a longer audio file and one for a shorter duration. Once that’s done, we’d need to develop a script that evaluates the length of the two layers to determine the duration of the assets in question. I believe that app.project.item().duration object should work for this.

Finally, once we know the length of the two layers, we should be able to use a $D.job.set() command to update the target value in the data to the comp with the matching layout logic.

Since this is a bit more complex than the previous questions, there’s likely going to be some trial and error involved in writing the script and testing to make sure that it executes correctly. However, from a conceptual level, I do believe it should be possible.

If you have any questions, let us know, and we’ll do our best to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@jcsjcs just checking back—have you had a chance to read my previous reply?

@snowfall0988 We have identified the cause that might break Time Sculpted projects rigged with earlier versions of Templater 3.4.0. We are working to release a 3.4.1 release soon.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

@Jeff

Thanks for the response
I can’t seem to find any obvious errors by looking at the log. I sent the files to the email that you provided.
Thanks

@Ridvan

Thanks for getting in touch with us. We’re currently working on integrating native srt support into the next version of Templater. Once set up, this process would be very similar to the way that Templater already reversions other assets, like footage or text.

We currently have a method to support .srt file-swapping in Templater, but it does require some customization to get up and running. You can check that out at this link on our GitHub Page.

Hopefully, that helps, but if there’s anything else we can do to help, please feel free to reach out.

Thanks,

Jeff