@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.

@oms The structure of the data returned is not readable by Templater. You need to have it respond to your request as an array of objects. Inside the objects, you cannot have nested objects either. You actually can, but Templater will ignore it. So for example your structure now is this: { "data": { "id":2, "name":"fuchsia rose", "year":2001, "color":"#C74375", "pantone_value":"17-2031" }, "support": { "url":"https://reqres.in/#support-heading", "text":"To keep ReqRes free, contributions towards server costs are appreciated!" } } But really it needs to be an array, and it needs to be “flat” objects inside that array. So it would be best to do: [ { "id" : 2, "name" : "fuchsia rose", "year" : 2001, "color" : "#C74375", "pantone_value" : "17-2031", "url" : "https://reqres.in/#support-heading", "text" : "To keep ReqRes free, contributions towards server costs are appreciated!" } ] Note how the singular object is still within an array [ ]. Also note that there are no nested objects in that singular object in the array. Does this help?

@jeff Thank you so much Jeff it helps a lot.

I stumbled on the issue, in case others find themselves in a similar situation: I had a layer with the Templater effect that was thrown outside its comp’s timeline. Whether this was a result of user error, or I had deleted a layer and forgot to update the effect settings, I am not sure. Once I found the culprit layer, I deleted it, re-created the layer, and re-applying the Templater effect. This caused it to behave normally again. I wish I knew the cause of the issue that made the layer appear outside of the comp’s timeline so I could avoid it in the future. But, for now, this gives me something to look out for in case the issue pops up again.

@Ben-Forman While Templater is able to use links to MP3 and MP4 files, the URL syntax requirements are very specific. Many web pages will use html to redirect requests to specific files, which can interfere with the ability to use remote assets in AE. Can you provide an example of the sort of URL you’re using? Appropriately formatted URL’s will generally end in with the filename of the file you’re looking to get, ie: https://download.samplelib.com/mp4/sample-10s.mp4 Let us take a look at the sort of URL you’re using, and we should be able to point you in the right direction. Thanks!

Perfect thanks!

Great to hear! Happy Rendering!

Thanks Jeff!

For output filenames, using characters from a subset of all possible characters can eliminate those types of “breaking” errors on write operations. Best practice is to simplify the naming of output to avoid operating system language settings from being the cause of an error. For references to footage assets in the data source, you should be able to write the reference path in the way your operating system displays it, so special characters should work there. Can you be specific about which is using special characters — output or references, or both? Thank you for performing more troubleshooting steps, looking forward to receiving more information on that.

@RonanDL If you’re looking to initiate a replication job with Templater based on a trigger, the easiest way would probably be to set up a script to run Templater in CLI configuration. The Command-Line interface for Templater relies on a file named templater-options.json to control all of the various Template Preferences options, so configuring it to replicate to versioned .aep files should be a snap. On the other hand, if you’re looking to switch between replication and rendering mid-job, that would be a bit trickier. I can think of a few different options that might work, but the easiest would be to use multiple Bots to process the data. You could set one to render and one to replicate and then designate which one the data is sent to using the reserved bot column. Hopefully, that makes sense, but if I can clarify anything, just let me know. Thanks!

@Junior The JSON files that Templater generates in that folder can be ignored. They aren’t relevant to what you’re doing. You will want to still remove any that got imported into the Project panel in your AEP file, as those can cause errors. You can have the project file and the replicated AEP files or videos in separate locations. The two are independent. In addition, you can also have the AME watch folder be in a completely different location from AME’s output folder. AME defaults to sorting the files it is processing into a source and an output folder within the main destination that you are watching, but you can set those to be separated.

@Tasnadi-Otto Hi! I replied to your other thread about the scaling issue, which is resolved in 2.9.6. We do not recommend using older versions of Templater, and if you are using it with Google Sheets, versions prior to 2.9.5 will stop working entirely with that data source in the near future. We don’t offer the older versions for download any longer. If you still need 2.9.1, the Windows installer would be included in the same zip archive as the MacOS one, so if you still have access to that in your MacOS downloads folder, you could get it that way. If you don’t still have access to that original download, it looks like you purchased through aescripts-- you can log into your account and go to your downloads section. From there, I believe it will allow you to download the original version you purchased, as well as the most recent version released. I don’t believe that their site offers intermediate versions, only the first and last ones.