@lalimec Apologies, it appears that the previous link has expired. I’ve gone ahead and set up a new invite that should be valid, and updated this post. If you run into any issues joining, let us know. Thanks!

@surabhiv I know this is an older post, but wanted to reply here in case a user might land here after searching. In July of 2025, we launched webhooks for QUE. This opens up many opportunities to integrate third-party services with automation pipelines that use QUE as a central data source. We’ve documented QUE’s webhook service which details everything that is available as of now. We are working toward implementing a security scheme so that you “consumers” can verify that webhook calls made from QUE are genuine. For now, you can begin to setup flows that suit your needs.

@R1ot Working with the Essential Graphics panel and Templater can be a bit daunting at first, as it’s a very unique workflow. Let me see if I can describe how we might set up a project in the way you described, and hopefully, that will be enough to get things moving in the right direction. For this example, I’m going to refer to our main AE comp as “Main Project”. The first thing we’ll want to do is locate the properties we want to adjust and drag them into the Essential Graphics Panel. For this example, let’s say we have an image layer named “picture”. We’ll want to open the Transform section of the properties and drag the “Scale” and “Position” properties into the EGP. Once we’ve got those properties in our EGP window, we’ll want to rename them to something that’s easy to reference in our Google Sheet. For now, let’s rename “Image Scale” to just “scale” and “Image Position” to “position”. From there, let’s create a new comp in AE and edit it so that the name is surrounded with double curly braces, like {{Comp1}}. The double curly braces will instruct Templater that this will be the default comp to process when it comes time to export. After that, we’ll want to drag our “Main Project” comp into the {{Comp1}} comp and rename it. For this example, I’m going to rename this comp to “assembly” (with no quotes). After that, we’ll want to drag the Templater Settings Effect onto our “assembly” comp so that Templater knows which EGP settings to adjust. We can verify that everything is set up correctly by opening the “assembly” comp and confirming that we have both the Templater Settings Effect and an Essential Properties section that contains our scale and position values. Now, we’ll want to head over to our Google Sheet to add the columns to control the data. The names should be formatted like this: layername@[property name]. So, for this example, we’ll want to add a column for our scale property: assembly@[scale], and one for our position property: assembly@[position]. Once that’s done, we’ll need to populate those columns with values. However, if we take a look at the scale and position values in our project, we’ll see that they both contain two values, separated by a comma. That means that the value for those properties is an array, and that will need to be reflected in our data source. So, for example, in our assembly@[position] column, we’ll need to add something like this: [100,100]. That should instruct Templater to set the value for the position EGP property to 100,100. This is a bit counterintuitive when it comes to the scale property, but since AE adjusts the horizontal and vertical scale with two different, matching values, we’ll still need an array for that property as well. Finally, we should be able to preview the {{Comp1}} project and see the results reflected in the Essential Properties values. As a quick side note, this won’t affect the linked properties in the “Main Project” comp, only in the “assembly” precomp in {{Comp1}}. Hopefully, that all makes sense, but if you have any questions, you can let us know here or get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com. Happy Rendering!

@jantrybus1993 Were you able to get the SRT workflow up and running?

@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

@Tom10 @Jeff @Maris @Jon Had the same issue for our own custom renderfarm. When starting AE over cmd you can actually add a “-noerr” flag that suppresses this popup. So now we always start AE over a .bat file with this flag: start afterFX.exe -noerr

@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!

@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.

@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.

@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

@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