@mikeg Hi! Sorry this got missed earlier. The Bot version of Templater has this functionality built-in. See this link for more info about render-status values.

@jeff YESS, that worked!! :) Thank you so much.

@turnerryan Glad to hear that worked!

@citizensam It’s difficult to say. I don’t think it’ll have that significant of an impact, but I haven’t done a head-to-head comparison before. AfterCodecs does have more efficient compression for h264/mp4 files than Adobe’s, but that’s not necessarily related to render speed. At least a part of the render time can be due to calculating compression, so sometimes it could be an option to test rendering to an intermediate lossless codec and then transcoding to mp4 with an extra step like Media Encoder or FFMPEG. Depending on the workflow you’re building, those might not be ideal, but it’s another avenue of exploration when you’re trying to shave off any time you can.

@citizensam interesting solution! We would love to see the transcription/captioning panel from Premiere come to AE, as dealing with subtitles in AE has always been less than ideal. Burn-in shouldn’t be the only option—sidecar files and embedded subtitle streams need to be added. I would recommend searching the Adobe forums to see if there’s already a feature request related to it, or making a new one if there isn’t. Ideally, AE should be able to handle SRT, VTT, and other common formats as inputs, as well as industry-standard outputting.

Thank you. Where can I find the templater preferences? Found it, thanks!

@jeff That makes sense. And unfortunately the aspect ratio is different for all the sizes, so it’s not as simple as just scaling the video. I’m going to make another post to see if anyone here uses Coda.io to generate JSON files. We use Coda with our client to submit project requests, so I’m thinking I may be able to make a document with that service to make a JSON file with all the variations. Thanks again for your help.

@citizensam Absolutely! New settings can be added to the “Render Settings” or “Output Module” through the existing After Effects tools located under the Edit>Templates menu. Once the new options are added, they should show up in the Templater panel once the “Load Settings & Module Templates” button is pressed. As a quick side note, it might also be useful to use the module and render-settings reserved columns to set the output settings using information from the Data Source the project is using. As long as the data in these two columns match up with valid options in the “Render Settings” and “Output Module” options in AE, Templater should use them when each row is processed. This can be useful if we need to switch between different output modules on the fly. Hopefully, that helps, but if you run into any issues, please feel free to get in touch, and we’ll do whatever we can to help out. Thanks, Jeff

@jeff Thanks for the reply, Jeff.

@veteos Glad to hear that’s resolved, and that it was an easy fix!

@ben-forman said in Best Way to Template Subtitle Track: @jon said in Best Way to Template Subtitle Track: So the line endings on Mac might work best as CR (rather than CRLF or LF). Sublime should let you change the line endings, too. Can you clarify what this means? Am I changing characters? Changing encodings? LF, CR, and CRLF are platform-specific “line-endings”—they tell the OS where a given line of text or code ends and a new one starts. The behavior where it was displaying all of the subtitle text at once is because AE and the OS aren’t correctly interpreting where each line ends. UTF-8 is a text character encoding—numerical representations of a graphical character/shape. There are also others like ASCII, UTF-16. The files in the GitHub repo are already UTF-8. When I created them on Windows, the files had CRLF line endings, but git automatically converted them to LF line endings upon uploading. I am on Windows and an older version of Sublime, but this is what it looks like on my menu. Save after changing. [image: 1682027310670-16d599cd-5194-4739-9b26-e6bd1e38e708-image.png]

@falrinth It’s an interesting idea! I’m not sure if it would be 100% workable, since Adobe’s handling of text layers can be a bit odd, but we can certainly consider the request. In the meantime, there is a technique we’ve used in the past that might help with this particular scenario. Basically, we could use an After Effects Expression to change the font according to a text value specified in the Data Source. To accomplish this, we’d want to start by creating a new text layer and connecting it to Templater. Once that’s done and we can verify the font name is being loaded, we can then apply this Expression: text.sourceText.style.setFont(comp("Globals").layer("Font01").text.sourceText); to the “Source Text” value of any text layer whose font we wanted to change. We’d need to change "Globals" to the comp that contains the layer and "Font01" to the layer name, but once that’s done, AE should read the font name from the Data Source and adjust any text layers accordingly. We’ve also used this technique to pre-emptively keep After Effects from reverting to the default font by proactively swapping over to one that can support the characters in question so that no error occurs during the render/replication process. The only catch to this method is that the font name in the Data Source must match AE’s listing exactly, or the font will be unable to load. The easiest way to locate the exact font name is to create a new text layer, expand the “Source Text” section, and click the small “play” button next to the pickwhip. This should bring up a menu. Navigate to Text>Font and choose the font you want to use. That should populate the text layer with the exact name of the font/style that After Effects uses. Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to run them by us. Thanks!

@jeff Thank you Jeff. Taking one part of the custom name directly from AE was the stuff i was looking for, so i can use output column in google sheets that would be combined by Templater with AE’s compositions’ names, but its not a big deal. Just thought it might be possible, since plugin is all about automating stuff. If for some reason its hard to do, its not a big problem.

@dwalters The most common cause for the error shown in the screenshot is, more often than not, attempting to authenticate using an older version of Templater. Google made a change to the authentication method that their API uses to grant apps access to Google Sheets last year. Due to this change, previous versions of Templater will no longer be able to sign in to Google Sheets. The first thing I’d try is updating to the latest version of Templater. You can download the installer for Templater Standard (for AE 2022 and above) from this link: https://assets.dataclay.com/Templater3.zip and Templater Legacy (For AE 2021 and below) here: https://assets.dataclay.com/Templater3-Legacy.zip Hopefully, that’s all we should need to get things up and running, but if you run into further issues, just let us know, and we’ll see where we need to go from there. Thanks!

@viriato The terminal window in that screenshot is an indication that Templater Bot is executing an Event Script at some point during the versioning process. Typically, when a Shell Script is registered to an event, it’ll be wrapped up in a command named templater-event-cmd.bat and run at the appropriate time during the Templater process. If this window is causing the process to hang up or fail, it likely has to do with one of the registered Event Scripts in Templater Bot. In order to figure out what’s happening here, we’ll likely need to take a look at any Shell Scripts registered with Templater. We’ll also need to see how those scripts are being invoked to get a clearer idea of what could be causing the issue. If you’d like, you can post that information here, but if you’d like to get in touch with us directly so as not to share this data on a public forum, you can always email us at support@dataclay.com. Hopefully, with a bit more information on how things are configured, we should be able to track down what’s causing this issue. Thanks!

@pbretz It can depend quite a bit on how your systems are configured, but I’ll try and outline the basics here. To run Event Scripts, the first thing you’ll need is a copy of Templater Bot. Event Scripts are only available on this version of Templater, so if you’re using Pro or Rig, this won’t be an option. Once you’ve got Bot set up, head to the Templater Preferences window and click on “Setup ExtendScripts”. From there, you should get a box that will allow you to choose which Templater event you’d like to use to trigger the Event Script. When I tested the script outlined above, I registered it on the “After layers update” event under “Layer Processing”. This instructs the script to run after any data versioning and Time Sculpting have been applied to the project. If you’re running Templater via CLI, you’ll want to specify the script you’d like to run in the templater-options.json file on the appropriate Event. In this case, you’d want to add it to the “post_cmd_update” event. Those are the basics, but more information can be found in this article from our support website. Additionally, we have some example scripts on our GitHub Page located here. If you run into any hurdles or if we can answer any questions, just let us know! Thanks!

Yeah, got it to work, had to select one of the jobs first, and then all columns showed :) This is great, I’m really starting to love QUE as much as I do Templater :-)