How to get instant video preview

surabhiv

Hello @all

I am using que Dataclay apis for creating desired video with given JSON parameters .It is working fine.I am getting correct output video with given Inputs.I need one more functionality to implement on my website in which we need instant preview of video that will show how video or Image will look as we sent Input parameters.Please suggest any method or api with which I can accomlish this task.Thanks in advance.

Jeff

@surabhiv

I believe we have just the thing for that. We recently released a pre-release version of Templater 3.0, which contains a new feature called Spot Check.

Spot Check allows you to generate stills from your project either for error-checking or to use as a preview in just the way you’ve described. Spot Checks can be generated randomly or using markers in the timeline to indicate specific areas to sample.

They can also be generated automatically when a project is rendered or replicated. Check out the “Spot Checks” section of the Preferences panel in Templater 3.0 for more details.

You can get Templater 3.0 (for After Effects 2022) from this link and Templater 3.0 Legacy (for After Effects 2021 and below) here. Hopefully, that’s what you’re looking for, but if you have any other questions, please just let us know.

Thanks!

surabhiv

@jeff Thank you for reply. I will check this but I need to show preview or stills using some code(jquery,javascript) or command or apis. is it possible?

Jeff

@surabhiv

That’s going to depend entirely on how the system is set up. If the customer is adding data to a web form and hitting a “preview” button, the data could be sent to a waiting Bot instance to generate a Spot Check output file. Once the file is created, it’s mostly going to depend on the system that’s set up to accept the customer data.

I’d recommend taking a look at this page for more information about what can be done using QUE’s API. It might also be helpful to use a tool like Zapier, which we’ve added some QUE integration into, to notify the system that the Spot Check has been completed.

Thanks!

surabhiv

@jeff Thanks for reply.We have impemented “Spot Checks”,get preview successfully.But we are facing two issues.First getting render preview after long time and secondly the naming convention is followed by some suffix.Can you please provide me any document link or video for these settings ? Thanks in advance.

Jeff

@surabhiv

Unfortunately, we’re still working on getting the documentation completed for the Spot Check feature. In the meantime, I can answer any direct questions you may have about how things work. Keep in mind that you can also contact us directly at support@dataclay.com.

As far as your questions go, let me address the second one first. The behavior that you’re describing where the filename has a number added to the end is generally a result of outputting an image sequence file without some specific notation in your data source. By default, After Effects will add the image sequence number for a TIF or PNG sequence output to the end of the filename.

So if your output were set to “video_output” in the output column of the data source, the filename would end up looking something like this: video_output.png00000 with the zeroes representing the sequence number. The way around this is to specify the location of the sequence number in the output column using the notation: [00000]. For example, if we added the notation to the output column so that it reads “video_output_[00000]” we should get an output like this: video_output_00000.png.

The Spot Check feature takes the image sequence numbering into account when it creates a preview file but might be thrown off if you’re already using the above notation in your output column. It might result in you getting a Spot Check with a name that includes the “[00000]” notation. We’d need to know more about the setup to make a more direct suggestion, but hopefully, that helps to get things moving in the right direction.

As far the question about generating the render preview, whether using the Spot Check feature or rendering a single frame comp manually, the time to render is going to depend largely on the complexity of the project. Any AE Expressions, Extendscripts, etc., will need to be run in addition to the usual asset swapping before an accurate preview image can be generated. I’d highly recommend contacting us directly at support@dataclay.com if you continue to have issues using this feature since we’ll probably need to discuss specifics concerning the project files/settings.

Thanks!

surabhiv

@jeff Thank you for reply.

surabhiv

@Jeff thank you.Now we are able to get preview instantly.Still having one concern ,we need both preview and video.But now we are getting only preview not video.Can you please guide us for this? Thanks in advance.

Jeff

@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.