Release — Templater 3.3

[Jeff]

The Dataclay team has released Templater 3.3, which adds some amazing new layout and footage options as well as some bug fixes. Thanks for your patience. You can download Templater 3.3 from this link:

https://assets.dataclay.com/Templater3.zip

Enjoy!

WHAT’S NEW IN 3.3

• NEW FEATURE — Support for Horizontal Layer Groups

  This release includes a new parameter in the Templater Settings effect called Group Direction. This setting lets you group chained layers horizontally as well as vertically. You can use grouping for nested elements, too. The default direction is set to Vertical.

• NEW FEATURE — Support for Parameters in Footage URLs

  If you’re using footage from online services or storage locations, you may find the URLs include parameters before the file extension. Templater now allows you to use these URLs to specify locations for footage elements in your compositions. Parameters in a URL typically appear after a question mark or other special character and supply additional metadata related to the URL. In the following example, the base URL is followed by parameters that specify the height of an image and the asset name.

  https://imglib.dclay.io/img/?height=220&img=headshot00412.png

  This feature makes it easier and robust to add accurate URLs to your dynamic comps

• Ability to Use Templater with an empty data source

  Have you ever wished you could start work on a project in Templater even if there’s no data yet in the linked data source? Now you can. For example, you may still be deciding what elements to include as dynamic content. Or you could decide to occasionally use Templater for layout or time-sculpting only. Templater will display a message reminding you the data source is empty, just in case.

• Improved Use of Composition Markers for Spot Checking

  Spot Checking, introduced in Templater 3.0.0, automates the rendering of still images from your compositions. You can then review these stills as a quality assurance check for your merged data.

  Templater now supports two methods of using markers to designate the points where a Spot Check image is generated. You can assign each marker a label that’s meaningful to you. Alternatively, Templater now allows unlabeled markers. In this case, Templater names each generated image as SPOTCHECK_1, SPOTCHECK_2, and so on. The more markers you have, the less helpful this naming convention becomes.

  Which is better: labeled or unlabeled? We strongly recommend that you always use labeled markers. This makes Spot Checking easier and quicker for you to use. When collaborating on a dynamic composition, it helps others to clearly understand the content of each Spot Check image.

  Note that you cannot use a combination of labeled and unlabeled markers, or Spot Checks may fail.

  If you don’t want to set your own markers, you can configure Templater to sample a specific number of frame in your composition and then review these images. Templater evenly distributes these across the entirety of your composition’s timeline. Therefore, the content of each image may or may not give you useful data. Spot Checking means you always get the frames that you want to see.

• Centralized Logging

  Templater now logs activities even when no specific project is open. These activities might include sign-ins, linking to data sources, and so on. A new button in Templater’s Preferences dialog allows you to quickly and easily find saved logs when you need to provide them to Dataclay’s support personnel. This button is located next to the Set Log Location field. Clicking the button opens the log location in either the macOS Finder or in Windows Explorer.

• QUE Job Selection Setup Dialog

  Several enhancements to this dialog make the options clearer and easier to use. The name of the first section has been changed from Batch Job Query to Filter Query. Also, the Sort By and Sort Order fields have been grouped together in a new Sorting section.

BUG FIXES

• For compositions at certain frame rates, the Spot Checking feature produced duplicate images for each marker.

• Templater was incorrectly applying a range validation check meant for Google Sheets data sources even while Templater was set to read QUE Campaigns.

• Templater did not retrieve additional pages when the command line interface was used and the additional_pages option was specified.