@ermalr To add to Jeff’s post, Templater ships with both Render Settings and Output Module templates that can add multiple pre-made presets. There are direction on this page on how to import them into After Effects.

@Jeff Thanks!

@Jeff Thanks so much! That all makes perfect sense. I was quite pleased to have reasoned out the solution I did, so your confirmation that it matches your recommendation is all I needed!

@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

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

@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.

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

Hi @Jeff,

Thanks for the super speedy response!

So I tried the expressions in that other link about highlighting text but it didn’t quite work (it was returning Error:“Can’t turn result into numeric value”).

But it’s ok as it led me to an alternative but still perfectly effective solution!

For more context:

We have 13 different risk warnings (set as collumns) for each row of data (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc)

The way I have set this up is so that I simply change the name of the Risk Warning pre-composition in After Effects from one license to the next (i.e. changing the data collected from one collumn to another in the Google Sheet) which then updates to the correct pre-composition with the correct text (also linked to the spreadsheet.)

Each Risk Warning pre-composition now has a text animator with the stroke added individually which was a simply copy/paste job really.

Here’s some visuals to help bring my terrible explanation to life:

Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 13.12.29.png
Each risk warning is in its own collumn (depending on the request from the marketing team for a particular risk warning we can generate the appropriate text directly in the project file and render a batch of assets for them)

Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 13.12.54.png
This pre-composition links to the corresponding collumn in the Google Sheet and changes the Pre-comp based on the collumn we want to use

Screenshot 2024-09-06 at 13.13.13.png
Each Pre-comp is set with an animator to create the stroke giving it that ‘bold’ effect (not linked to the spreadsheet as the stroke will not change - only the text within the Google Sheet will change once per quarter (and even then it’s just 2 numbers which won’t affect which words are ‘bold’ and which are not)

Thanks for your help!

Jake

@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.

@Jeff Thank you Jeff for the quick reply!
I have just checked another project i have been working on today, and indeed on this project the templater settings effect remained on the target composition’s inner comps’ layers after creating variants. Thats indeed odd. I will come back to you, after i encounter that strange behavior again. Perhaps will be able to pinpoint the reason aswell. I thought thats just how it was coded - that its default behavior for some reason. Apologies for the confusion.

@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

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 🙂

Hi There,

Apologies for the long delay here. We are on the cusp of releasing an update to Templater and needed some heads down time with the code 🙂

If you have pre rendered elements already setup, that’s a good first step! The less calculation that AE has to perform the faster it will speed through the frames. However, please note that the pre-rendered files you import to AE as layers are best saved as uncompressed files. Why? Because for every frame that AE reads in a compressed video file, it has to decode the compressed image before it can composite it—this slows down AE considerably. So, it saved a good deal of time to have AE skip any decoding. You might try to export as a PNG sequence or an uncompressed Quicktime.

This poses another problem—that of space on your drive. Since you have a 1:20 video, any pre-rendered element is likely to be HUGE if you store it as uncompressed video. So, just be sure you have enough space on your drive to handle a huge file like that.

The other factor that impacts speed is output resolution. In your output module, you can set it to render at half resolution so that AE doesn’t process an inordinate amount of pixels for every frame. Of course, you need to consider your final projection platform to really take this into consideration. If you are making mobile only, then rendering at half resolution can save you a considerable amount of time.

Another technique involves post-processing the output with a command line program like ffmpeg. In this case, you can render out segments of your master composition that have absolutley NO dynamic frames. That is, render out the frames that do not change and place them on your drive. Then, when running through the 500 rows, you can render out the segments that change. Finally, you can use a post-job event script to “stitch” or concatenate the pre-rendered video files with the dynamic output that Templater creates. This is an advanced technique, but you can see how to use ffmpeg with a NodeJS wrapper on our github repository. The catch here is that all the video files you stitch together must be created with the same output module out of AE. Otherwise, you will see visual artifacts that just aren’t desirable. In addition, if you want to have audio on the video, you’ll need to mix it in that ffmpeg process. FFmpeg is a very complex program and does require some level of expertise to use effectively.

Another way to handle speed is to have multiple machines with aerender installed on them. Then have Templater replicate the master comp with the “Send Replicates to Adobe Media Encoder” preference checked. This will effectively create an project file with a replica comp of the master comp. Use the post-job script to copy the project file to a machine that has aerender on it. Use aerender’s command line options to have it render out the replicated composition. The catch on this one is to make sure the machine running aerender has all drive and folder mappings exactly the same as on the machine that you created the template.

I know this is alot of information. I definitely want to make these techniques into a video, and that will likely come towards the end of the year.

Thanks for your patience with us as we grow Dataclay! Looking forward to hearing about your outcomes!

@wst-shorty You only need to start AE once for each video, not for each render.

For a single video, have more than one object / row that each specifies which compositions you want AE to render. That is, each object / row will have a different target value. Then, specify those rows / objects in row_start and row_end values in the templater-options.json file.

You should also register a script for the post-batch event that handles the “stitching” together of the outputs. Go through the README file on our github repo for event-scripts. Take note of the NodeJS concatenate sample script that does this. You’re using PHP so it will be different, but if you have node installed on the server, you can use it straight away.

Please let us know if this helps.

Thanks!

@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

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

Sorry you’re having that issue. We’re working hard to get the docs and GitHub repo updated to reflect all of the new features of 2.7. We’re hoping to have those up in the next few days. In the meantime, we added a new setting to the Templater Preferences. Can I have you try adding this line into the prefs object of your templater-options.json: "supress_ae_dialogs" : true

We’re going to be issuing an update soon, so for 2.7.1 that option will no longer be required.

Also, if you are launching the Bot with the CLI, make sure that you use a -ui argument in your shell script.

@gjkoble Yes this is absolutely possible by enabling Bot. The trial actually gives you all features from all editions of Templater. So, technically, you could not acheive what you are asking with Templater Rig, you would need Templater Bot. However, since you are still within your trial period, you could still do this.

You can point to any URL that responds with JSON object arrays. Each object in the array would effectively be a new video. It’s up to you how you want to setup the server that Templater requests data from at regular intervals. You can see Bot in action by watching the following video:

The Bot for Templater

However, that video shows a Google Sheet as a Templater data source. You can do the same thing except instead of using a Google Sheet, you can use a URL feed. Learn more about using URL feeds with Templater on our support site. Note the following from that article, however:

When using a URL feed, The Bot cannot update the value of the “render-status” key because the data source is specific to the user’s system. Therefore, users should register custom scripts to update “render-status” values at appropriate events to avoid re-rendering “ready” data.

Hopefully this helps, and please do not hesitate to ask any more questions!

Thank you for giving Templater a spin!

@rens Unfortunately AE’s API access to the character palette is extremely limited, so your best bet would be to create a pre-job script that copies your master AEP and opens the project in AE, to run Templater off of the copy instead of the master. This will leave your master always untouched. In the instance that a missing glyph breaks one project, it won’t break all of the subsequent projects. You could also try running an ExtendScript that updates the font on that layer on the post-update event every time, but I think that could be more problematic.

Bot events.

@kdav82 Are you using a local JSON file, or a JSON feed/URL? If you’re using a JSON feed, have you registered a script with the post-output or post-job event in Templater’s Preferences, and if you have, what is the script/incantation that you’re using? When you are using the CLI, are you launching the Bot, or are you launching a batch render job? If you’re using a render job, it will ignore the render-status. The downside of using the CLI to run the Bot is that it won’t ever spin down-- the process needs to be ended manually, where a batch render job can close on completion.