@dave Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to change a text layer to a footage layer dynamically in After Effects. From what I can see, this appears to be due to the fact that AE sets each layer’s type when it’s first created, and text layers seem to be using an entirely different logic engine than footage layers. If I understand the scenario that you’re describing and you’re using Google Sheets, our best bet might be to use some Sheets formulas to turn “First Last - usa.png” into two cells that contain “First Last” and “usa.png”. That would be data that would be more useable for Templater since the “usa.png” value could be set to refer to footage, and the “First Last” input could be added to a corresponding text layer. Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please let us know, and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks, Jeff

@Jeff Thanks for the info. I’m familiar with the Filter action in Zapier and will try that out. I was expecting that we’d need to use a Que action. Thanks. Pete

@Jeff Thank you. I understand that there needs to be a limitation for the free version, but I almost shot myself in the foot by batch importing 40+ jobs. I’m working on my 2nd Campaign, and I will use that for some more testing. Right now I’m just trying to learn how it works and testing to make sure I can get the data imported from my source. I’ll reach out if I need to delete anything, but I think I understand enough to be able to avoid that for now. Thanks

@Jeff Just to close the loop on this. Support informed me that the comment field in each marker needs to be filled in for the Spot Check feature to work. Problem solved.

@Jeff That is awesome! Thank you! Worked like a charm

@Jeff Thanks for the info. I’m familiar with expressions, but far from an expert. We’ll see how this goes. I’ll circle back either way. -josh

@rkvalvaa Before we get too far into the weeds, it should be noted that we may have a temporary fix available for the issue with Google Sheets and Templater Bot. If you open a support ticket with us or contact us at support@dataclay.com we can discuss those options further. As far as the questions about QUE go, I’d like to address the second one first since it’s a more straightforward “fix”. To use an Autograf on multiple Satellites, you should only need to add a “bot” key to the Job to specify which system should process the data. Usually, each Job will be assigned to the default Satellite specified in the Campaign settings. However, this can be overridden with a value assigned via the “bot” reserved key. Additionally, it shouldn’t be necessary to register the same Autograf multiple times. As long as the Autograf data is present in the QUE account that the system is connecting to, it should be possible to use the same registration data on multiple systems. As for the first question, this has to do with a fundamental difference in how data is handled in QUE as opposed to Google Sheets. In a Google Sheet, each cell either has data or doesn’t, but the cell is always present for Templater to read, even if it’s empty. In a JSON format, like the one QUE uses, a value may disappear entirely. When this happens, Templater keeps the previously loaded data since it’s not getting any information to use to determine how to handle the associated layer. I can think of a couple of ways to get around this, but the easiest would be to pass through a “blank” or “empty” value rather than omit the property entirely. This will likely depend on how the Zap is set up that’s passing data over from Google Sheets to QUE, but that would definitely be the most basic and straightforward fix. The other solution would be to create multiple Autografs to swap between using an aep value from the Data Source. Using this method, you should be able to create versions of the project that simply excise the layers that won’t be getting values. This would likely take more work, depending on how many assets might need to be customized, but it would result in a cleaner final product since Templater wouldn’t have to process the missing layers. Hopefully, that gets us on the right track, but please feel free to contact us at support@dataclay.com for more assistance. Thanks, Jeff

@jeff Thank you! No wonder I couldn’t get those .aep files directly into Media Encoder. I’ll look into AfterCodecs. That could be a great alternative to a watch folder workflow for just one type of deliverable.

@Jeff @Jon , Good afternoon, could you tell me a prediction of normalization? I ask this because it is impacting a lot on our workflow. I need to decide whether to redo some internal processes.

@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]