@megan

Thanks for getting in touch with us. We recently identified a bug in Templater 3.7.1 that is almost certainly the cause of this error message.

To fix it, we’ll want to open the Templater Preferences, then click “Advanced” and uncheck “Layout engine” and “Time Sculpting”. Next, click on the “Bot” tab in Templater’s Preferences and ensure the “Prevent event script execution on Preview” is enabled. Once that’s done, we’ll want to see if the error persists. If it goes away, we should be able to reenable the “Layout engine” and “Time Sculpting” options.

If we continue to see the issue after performing these steps, we’ll probably want to continue this conversation through our support channels, as we’ll likely need to get some log files from the system that might contain information that wouldn’t be appropriate to post publicly. If we end up going that route, you can email us at support@dataclay.com or post a new helpdesk ticket right here.

Thanks,

Jeff

The Dataclay team has released Templater 3.7.1, which adds some brand-new features, such as our Metered Output Option and support for Generative AI Text. You can download Templater 3.7.1 from this link:

Enjoy!

WHAT’S NEW IN TEMPLATER 3.7.1

Templater 3.7 contains several exciting new features as well as an important change for those who use Google Sheets as their data source. It also includes UI updates and several bug fixes.

• New Feature: QUE Meter for Templater Output

  The QUE Meter is a new service for Templater that supports pay-as-you-go production of customized videos. You can now:

  • Purchase Templater Rig to prepare After Effects projects for automation workflows.

  • Purchase QUE Credits when you are ready to batch output customized video using your Templater Rig activation. Spot checking, replicating, and rendering consumes one QUE Credit per output.

  You can purchase QUE Credits for your QUE Meter at: http://dataclay.com/credits

• New Feature: File Picker for Google Drive

  Google has introduced a number of new security requirements that affect how Templater obtains authorization to read data to and from Google Sheets documents. As a result, the workflow for authorizing Templater to access your Google Sheets documents has changed with this release.

  After you authorize Templater to access your Google account, you will need to also launch the “File Picker for Google Drive” from Templater to grant access to specific Sheets available in your Google Drive.

WARNING: If you rely on Google Sheets as a data source, you must upgrade Templater to version 3.7 soon. In the near future, earlier versions of Templater will no longer support direct integration with Google Sheets.

• New Feature: Support for Generative AI Text

  You can now use your existing AI service to generate synthetic text content for dynamic text layers. Enter a prompt directly within a text layer’s Templater Settings effect under the Generative AI parameter group.

  When Templater cannot map a value to a dynamic text layer, it will attempt to send the layer’s stored prompt to your preferred generative AI service and will await a suggestion that will map to the dynamic text layer. This feature currently supports:

  • ChatGPT from OpenAI

  • Claude from Anthropic

• User Interface Updates

  You can now set a preference to highlight the most recently previewed row in your Google Sheets data source. This can help you to better identify the spreadsheet row that Templater most recently processed

  A new set of preferences has been added to control the generative AI feature.

  The Templater app logo has been added in various locations throughout the UI.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes in Templater 3.7.1

• The offline help documentation in CHM format no longer ships with the Templater archive. Download the offline docs at: https://dataclay.com/downloads/templater-docs.

• Previously misinterpreted values for updating dynamic essential properties are now interpreted correctly.

• Offline license deactivation is now possible without having an activated license.

• SRT subtitle layers better estimate line count in paragraphs.

• Bugs were fixed relating to machine profiling on Windows machines during QUE Satellite registration by removing dependency on the wmic command.

• Improved Templater authorization implementation for accessing both QUE and Google Sheets.

• Fixed a long-standing bug where Templater would not interpret null values correctly.

@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

@Mariusz

Hmmm. That’s quite odd. Templater shouldn’t have any mechanisms to remove the Templater Settings Effect from the main Project file during the reversioning process. The only thing I can think of that might cause this sort of thing would be if there was some sort of error in AE that caused the file not to be saved properly once Templater was added to the layers in question.

One thing we might try would be to clear the After Effects Preferences just to make sure that there’s not some sort of setting there that’s causing an issue.

If that doesn’t change what you’re seeing, we’ll probably need to take a look at the templater.log and templater.err files to see if we can find any information there that might help to narrow things down. We’ll also likely need to get some information about the version of Templater and AE we’re running, as well as the license key.

Given that this information could contain potentially sensitive details, you might want to email us directly at support@dataclay.com rather than posting here.

Let us know how it goes and we’ll see where we need to go from there.

Thanks,

Jeff

@Tom10

We did some testing this morning, and it appears that the AEDebugShowPreviousCrashWarning key has been removed from AE 25.0.1 and AE 25.1.0. One of our engineers reported that it was still present in 25.0.0, but it seems like Adobe is removing this as a debug option moving forward.

This would explain why the forum posts that were previously linked in this thread seem to have been deleted from Adobe’s site.

It’s possible that you might be able to add the debug string:

AE.DebugShowPreviousCrashWarning true true

back to the Debug Database.txt file manually, but even if it works (which is unclear at the moment), I doubt that it will be a stable solution in the long run.

At this point, I think the only option to get this option restored would be to contact Adobe directly and see if they’d be willing to consider adding the feature in a later update.

Unfortunately, that’s all we know at the moment, but if we get any updates or have any other input on this, we’ll definitely update this thread.

Thanks,

Jeff

@Tom10

Great question. I did some digging, and the reason that we don’t currently surface that option in the UI version of Templater is mainly related to the way that Templater operates when generating versioned replicates.

Due to some quirks in the way that After Effects interacts with project files, it’s necessary for Templater to save the project when performing a replication. However, it appears that this shouldn’t be mandatory when Templater is creating an output via the standard render modules.

I’ll go ahead and put in a Feature Request to see if this is something that we can add as an option to a future version of Templater, but for right now, an Event Script is probably going to be our best solution for controlling whether Templater saves a file in UI mode once reversioning is complete.

If you have any other questions, let us know, and we’ll be more than happy to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@joevac

Since Spot Check is considered a standard Templater Bot action on par with Replication or Rendering, there’s not really a way to keep it from changing the render-status to “done” when it runs. However, there may be some techniques that we could use to get around the issue that you’re describing.

The easiest would probably be to add another value to each Job that indicates whether a Job is a Spot Check or a standard output. Once that was in place, you could modify the Zap to match both the render-status and the new value before running. That should have the effect of filtering out any Jobs that are run solely as a Spot Check.

Hopefully that helps get things moving in the right direction. We might be able to make some additional suggestions on how to resolve the problem if this isn’t a feasible solution, but to do so, we’d need to get some more information about how everything is set up.

Let us know how it goes, and we’ll see where we need to go from there.

Thanks,

Jeff

@pbretz

Hmmm. That’s quite odd. The only thing I can think of that might be interfering with the asset swap in the way that you’ve described is if an Event Script is present that’s overriding Templater’s standard reversioning logic before it can be performed.

If that’s not the case, it might be beneficial to try manually replacing the asset in the AE Project panel by right-clicking on it and using the Replace Footage> File option. If that still doesn’t swap the file, there might be an issue with After Effects or this specific Project file that we’ll need to address.

Another option that might get things moving in the right direction would be to look at the templater.log and, more importantly, the templater.err files to see if there are any messages there that might give us a better idea of what’s happening when Templater attempts to reversion the layer in question.

If there is a failure reported in either of those files, we could be looking at a situation where another logic problem is causing Templater to stop the reversioning process before it can process the mp3 layer in question.

If you’d like to share those files here, we can certainly take a look. However, if the logs contain sensitive information, you can also get in touch with us at support@dataclay.com, and we’ll be more than happy to continue troubleshooting the issue through that channel.

Let us know how it goes and we’ll see where we need to go from there.

Thanks,

Jeff

@joevac

Dataclay QUE should absolutely update the render-status to “done” even if you’re rendering with Templater Pro. As far as the other question is concerned, there are quite a few benefits to using QUE to interface with Templater, even if you’re not using Templater Bot.

The first benefit is that QUE is highly flexible and efficient when it comes to the storage of data since it’s not limited to a spreadsheet’s rigid format. This allows a lot more flexibility in changing between projects on the fly while still using the same Campaign and Project data.

QUE also provides much more information on each Job’s status than we’re able to provide using the Google Sheets API. If you take a look in the QUE interface at the “View Job Logs” option all the way on the right, you should be able to see that data.

Finally, QUE has a number of easy-to-use API hooks that can give users the flexibility to set up intricate systems to deposit data from a number of different sources directly into their QUE campaigns. Check out this link for more information on that feature.

Hopefully, that all makes sense, but if you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks,

Jeff