@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.

From Adobe support:

“Had shared the case with my seniors. The Console was a developer tool and was there till Version 2024 and have been discontinued for now.”

@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

@eric_dean

Great question! Escaping the quotation marks should be as easy as putting a backslash before the quotes in the text block of our JSON file. So, for example, if we wanted something like this:

Lorem ipsum "dolor" sit amet

we’d write it like this:

Lorem ipsum \"dolor\" sit amet

The backslashes should be read as an “escape” to keep the quotation marks in the text from interfering with the formatting of the JSON data file.

Hopefully, that should be all we need, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@1337err

We can take a look at the templater.log and templater.err files to see if there’s any additional information there, but from my experience, I doubt that there will be anything more specific than what we’ve already got. Unfortunately, AE tends to be a bit vague with its error syntax.

However, if we can reliably re-create the error, we should be able to use the technique that I outlined in my previous post to narrow things down relatively quickly. In the past, I’ve done this by making a copy of the file with the problem, opening it, and bulk deleting 50% of the assets in the Project panel. Depending on whether the error persists, we should be able to logically assess which half of the project data contains the error.

Once we figure that out, we can repeat the process by either restoring the deleted assets and deleting the other 50% or by deleting 50% of what’s left and checking whether the error reoccurs. By chopping out increasingly smaller chunks of the project, we should be able to get a bead on what layers are causing the issue without a massive amount of undue work. Hopefully that helps to get things moving in the right direction.

Thanks,

Jeff

@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.

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

@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