Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s not really a way to “freeze” assets in a project file in the way that you’re describing. This is mainly caused by limitations in After Effects, where third-party plugins like Templater aren’t provided with a list of what assets are needed for each render action.

However, one suggestion that might help would be to break the project file up into individual aep files and then use Templater’s aep Reserved Column to switch between projects as necessary.

This method has the advantage of keeping each file relatively small and streamlined, so Templater doesn’t have to swap out layers that are potentially redundant. However, if the file contains a large number of potential target compositions, it can sometimes be more trouble than it’s worth.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have further questions or issues, please don’t hesitate to let us know here or through our main support channel at support@dataclay.com, and we’ll be more than happy to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff