Templater changes text in all comps with effect applied?

[Matt Keyes]

Hello-
Let me preface this by saying that using Templater has been life changing, and I think it’s a great product, but I know you’re always looking to make it better.

I’m curious if there’s an explanation for why Templater changes the text in all comps even if they are not the target comp, but they contain layers with the Templater effect applied, and the names of the layers occur in the header of the data file.

When I target a comp with curly braces and hit Replicate, Templater seems to be spending a lot of time and resources going through Comps and changing text layers that are not the target. I can see this happen, because I have a comp that is not the target open in the viewer.

Is this the expected behavior? Is there an explanation for this?

Thanks again!

[Jeff]

@Matt-Keyes

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the way that After Effects surfaces project data to a plugin like Templater, it’s not possible for the software to evaluate which assets are necessary and which will be redundant when the project is versioned. This results in the situation that you’ve described, where Templater has no real choice but to re-version all of the assets in the project file each time it’s run.

Without a change on Adobe’s side to how After Effects presents file data to plugins, I’m afraid that changing this behavior will likely be impossible. However, there is a Templater option that might help in this particular scenario.

A reserved term was added to Templater a while back named aep that will allow the end user to load a different project file for each Job that’s processed. In a scenario where a project had many different comps and assets, like the one you’ve described, we’d recommend splitting the project into multiple, simplified AE files and then using the aep reserved term to load each project file as needed.

This would remove the need for Templater to re-version redundant assets since each file could be optimized for a specific use case. Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know, and we’ll do what we can to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Matt Keyes]

@Jeff Thanks for your detailed response! My curiosity has been satiated on this matter.