Complete Beginner - Batch Assembling Videos

amesdigital

Hey all,

I’m on the trial of Templater (soon to buy if I can figure this out) and have a request that is sort of simple, but is slowly melting my brain away.

Basically what I’d like to do is set up an After Effects project that allows an external client with no expertise of AE to go in and make simple changes.

I want to make 7 different compositions that each contain a few rows of different text data (correlated to Google Sheets so client can avoid clicking into each animated pre-comp), and then essentially right click and replace the footage inside the corresponding comps (all footage they use is the same duration), and then allow them to simply render out a basic assembly of a clip using pre-set render instructions.

Update text in Sheets -> Open AE -> Replace footage -> Update the sheet data in Templater -> Batch render -> Party time.

How doable is this? Can someone with a much calmer, logic-centred brain help me out here? I’ve been watching the tutorials, but they’re a bit out of whack and send me in a data spiral.

Thanks for reading!

Harrison

Jeff

@amesdigital

Thanks for getting in touch with us. The scenario that you’ve described should be possible using Templater. In fact, with the correct setup, you shouldn’t need to edit the AE file directly. Using a few of Templater’s basic features, you should be able to control the text content and the composition selection entirely from your data source.

Swapping out the contents of a text field is one of the most basic and useful features of Templater. Once Templater is installed and connected to your data source of choice (Google Sheet, QUE Campaign, or local file), simply rename the layer to match the column/data point in question and apply the Templater Effect. Once that’s done, Templater should swap the text in the corresponding layer during the Preview or Render process.

As far as swapping out a composition, Templater has a reserved column named target that can be used to designate which .aep file Templater should load for each set of data. This should allow you to swap out the project file on the fly to whichever the end-user desires.

Finally, if you wanted to automate the process, you could always use Templater Bot to monitor your data source for new entries continuously. There’s another reserved column named render-status that Templater Bot searches for continuously. When a line of data is added with a render-status of “ready” Templater Bot will bring in the data and process the video.

Those are the basics, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know.

Thanks!