Hi @jeff many thanks for the information - this is exactly how I ended up doing it after learning about the curly braces feature after 3 years of using Templater, incredible. Cheers!

@jeff I got it now. Thank you!

@surabhiv At the moment, Templater Bot can only be set up to automate either video production or Spot Checking, so if you’d like to have both actions automated, you’ll need to look into running two separate versions of Templater. There is a Reserved Column that Templater recognizes named bot that will allow you to designate which Bot should process each line of data in your data source. Using this feature, you should be able to route preview actions to one Bot to perform Spot Checks and render actions to another that can do render/replication actions.

Just some additional info: we’re using Templater 3, build 13978. I’m using Google Sheets as a data source.

@jon Thanks. The audio length will vary with each video. I’ll take a look at the link you posted.

@jeff AMAZING! Thank you for such a quick response! Got it working now. I was just able to pump out a list of 150 dealerships to Youtube ready MP4’s in just over 20 mins… Templater fricking rules. You can expect a new customer within a week or so!

@jeff Thanks jeff, everything works fine!

@junior What can you tell us about your system? Which operating system, version of After Effects, and version of Templater do you have installed? Have you run any updates to any software lately? Is your OS user account a full admin?

@mantas Thanks for getting in touch with us. The behavior you describe is generally caused by a layer that isn’t renamed before Templater swaps in the data. If you take a look at the Layer Name, when you add the asset to your Layer Stack, you’ll see that it’s surrounded in brackets. This indicates that the layer name is temporary, so when the asset gets swapped in, it renames the layer. To fix this, simply rename the layer before applying the Templater Effect to remove the brackets. This should keep the layer from being renamed when the asset is swapped. Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any more questions, please feel free to let us know. Thanks!

@jeff okay thanks

@tok_tok Let’s try moving the script to the “After layers update” event under “Layer Processing”. It’s possible that having it run at Data Retrieval may be too early to process the Work Area correctly. Give that a shot, and if you still run into problems, it might be easier if you could drop us a line directly at support@dataclay.com. Thanks!

@fg27 apologies for the long delay in responding. I’ve never seen that error in connection with Templater. Which version of AE and Templater are you using? What about any other 3rd party effects applied to layers? Are you replicating internally to the project to make new folders/comps within the existing project file, or are you replicating to individual AEP files for Media Encoder to render? We’d need to see more of a sample of the data and the full templater.log file. You can submit a support ticket with any relevant attachments.

@jeff Yes! This is it! Thanks, everyone.

Hi…I utilize a comparable methodology while making client docs. I start by archiving the fundamental item, then, at that point, add the varieties. I utilize contingent labels to distinguish content for a particular yield. I likewise make preparing materials utilizing a comparative methodology. Assuming the variety is theme based, ie there is a distinction in subjects utilized in the material, I then, at that point, utilize diverse TOCs to construct the yield. Sometimes I utilize a mix of the two methods, for instance preparing material does exclude every one of the points so utilizes a seperate TOC, and has its own restrictive labels to control content inside the subjects. I additionally use conditions for on the web/print renditions. The print form incorporates screen captures, yet I don’t utilize numerous screen captures for online conveyance (except if I need the client to see what the screen should resemble). Very little point having screen captures on the off chance that the client has the program open.

@tasnadi-otto OK. I think this will work for what you’re trying to do: var compName = $D.job.get("compname"); var layerName = $D.job.get("layername"); var layerTime = $D.job.get("time"); var myComp; for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i ++) { if ((app.project.item(i) instanceof CompItem) && (app.project.item(i).name === compName)) { myComp = app.project.item(i); break; } } myComp.layer(layerName).startTime = layerTime; I’ll explain the methodology briefly here so that you can adjust as needed. The comp name is set by the “compname” field in the data source (more on that in a second), the layer by “layername”, the time value by “time”. These values can obviously be altered to fit your project as needed. The code that begins with var myComp; is essentially a quick loop that searches your Project for the text outlined in the compName variable and returns the index value. That way, you can pick the comp using plain text rather than an index. The layer name within the comp can be designated by text, so that’s what the layerName variable is for. I tested this on the “Before layers update” event, and it seemed to work without an issue. It’s possible there might be some issues if you have a huge number of layers that all need updating, but this should be a good starting point. If you run into trouble, feel free to let us know, and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks!

@yesimfaceless Hi! Thank you for writing into our support, I just wanted to follow up with a response here to help the community of users. I’ve pulled from my response and inserted it here. Please let us know if you have any questions. I understand the question about getting the photo that matches the form entry to the appropriate user. At the moment, you would likely need to use Templater’s event architecture to accomplish this. Essentially, what you would need to do is write a script — in your language of preference — that executes immediately after the render finishes. That script might do something like: Convert the output to a preferred codec / format (eg. gif, mp4, etc.) Transfer or move the output to a preferred destination (eg. AWS S3 bucket) Notify an email address as to where to download the asset. With the script written, a developer can “register” their script to Templater’s events. You can read about that in this topic within our docs. Also, as an added resource, we maintain an open repository of example event scripts that are useful for developers to get started.

@coeing Sorry for the time sink — I know it can be painful. We have fixed this, but we are working towards polishing some features in Templater with our new API product, QUE which is an intense dev task. We are aiming to release Templater 3 before end of year. Thank you for your patience and for using our software!

@cristian Thanks for the update. Are the new comps being created when you preview the next row in your data set? Or is this happening when you hit the “replicate” button in Templater? Templater won’t typically create new precomps when swapping between assets, so we need to narrow down how exactly this project is laid out. Could you outline the steps one by one that led to the behavior that you’re seeing? Hopefully, that’ll give us a better picture of what exactly is happening. You can also get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com if you’d like to share these details in a more direct message. Let us know what you can, and we’ll take it from there. Thanks!

@ben-forman This may be possible (or close to it) with some really hacky math-based expressions, but I haven’t been able to figure it out getting it working within a project in the immediate term. The way that the loopOut() expression works (requiring two keyframes) interferes with the way that time remapping would need to function in the context of Templater’s Time Sculpting and layer-swapping logic-- using only one Time Remapping keyframe at the beginning of the layer (to accommodate for the unknown variable duration of each video-- if there is a second keyframe, it won’t adapt to the full duration of the source footage). Since you don’t know how many loops may be necessary, that adds another layer of complication, and then there is the circular way that the durations of each will need to reference each other-- it’s pretty intense logic. Using the techniques I’ve tried, you’d either have to choose between playing the full “loop” only once, and you could maybe loop it infinitely for the duration of the layer, but you still run into the issue of setting the out point of the video layer itself, which is not something that expressions can do. This is likely in the realm of writing an ExtendScript function that can look at the source duration of each video, compare it to the duration of the source of the audio, enable time remapping, set the in/out point of each video to dur x loops, then set the start and end of the containing comp to match the layer duration of the time-remapped video. Now, it may be that this is the kind of thing that can be hacked together and largely handled through the data. For example, if you knew the frame-exact durations of each, you could specifically pre-define variant comps that loop x number of times, then comp swap each into your target depending on how many loops you need. If you have precomps like vid-loops-1, vid-loops-2, etc., you could then set a value in the data to swap the comps as if they were footage, too, (by defining them with {{<comp-name>}} in the data) then there’s no messing with time-remapping-- only Time Sculpting. There could even be another ExtendScript approach that would expand on/automate this idea, where it’s doing those comparison calculations within a function, then swapping between the pre-comps for the variant with the appropriate number of loops.