I have painted myself into a corner. I created a master comp that is properly set up to import 31 fields from a google sheet. And in another comp, I have various text layers and their text properties connected via expressions to the certain text layers in the master comp that is controlled by the spreadsheet. The problem is when I want to adjust a characters baseline (for example, a registration mark), as expressions doesn't have access to any of the character tools (baseline, kerning, etc etc). Anyone run into this problem and figured out an efficient way around this limitation?
It's unfortunately extremely limiting to do anything per-character with either expressions or ExtendScript scripting. It's a serious limitation of the After Effects Text Tool, that you can only do granular mixed character formatting and styles if you are manually editing a text layer or text box. We have experimentally developed a technique that involves AE's text animators and expressions to do this, but you are still limited by the properties that Adobe exposes in the text animator controls. In this case, you can modify the tracking, kerning, and alignment, but not baseline. You can read this post on Dataclay's forums and download this sample project file to see the technique demonstrated to adjust the a text highlight color for a range of text within a larger text layer.
Glad that you found a solution! Since Text Animators can use Templater layers as variable data for AE Expressions, they're going to the best bet for customizing text properties in the way that you've described. If you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know. Thanks!
Having trouble getting google to authorize the plugin. I keep getting the error from google when I try to sign in:
This app is blocked
This app tried to access sensitive info in your Google Account. To keep your account safe, Google blocked this access.
Im using v3.0 of the plugin
Hi Tony,
We're aware of this issue, as it just appeared today. We are actively investigating the cause and working with Google to find a solution. In the meantime, we recommend exporting your Sheet data to JSON or TSV.
Edit: you can also follow Dataclay's social channels for updates.
Thanks for your patience. It looks like the issue has been resolved on Google's side, and you should be able to authenticate with your account. Give it a shot, and let us know if you have any issues. Otherwise, you should be good to go!
When I try to link my google account - I get the error "An error occurred while making a network request. Ensure the network resource exists, is online and was not deleted." also in my browser it says I'm logged in to google drive but it says i'm logged out in templater -- help ! XD
This sounds like an issue we see from time to time where an overzealous antivirus, antimalware, or firewall software will block Templater's request to the Google API. Could you try temporarily disabling any security software running on the system and see if that makes any difference? It might also be necessary to run After Effects "as an administrator" to temporarily elevate its access rights to make a connection to the Google Sheet. If neither of those suggestions changes anything, we might need to open a direct troubleshooting ticket https://aescripts.com/contact/?product_id=1121&direct=1 to check some of the finer details in how Templater is set up.
Let us know how it goes, and we'll take it from there. Thanks!
Spot Check, Replicate, and Render are all features that are limited to Templater Pro and Templater Bot. Enable Bot is explicitly limited to the Bot version of Templater. Templater Rig was mainly created as a design and editing tool that our end users could use to create and edit Templates that would then be processed by Templater Pro or Templater Bot. As such, those options are disabled in the Rig version of Templater.
Hopefully, that clears things up. I responded to your previous issue in the ticket submitted to the aescripts support system, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know, and we'll do whatever we can to help out.
An amazing plugin though challenging to use too. The more customizable an animation the more engineering you need to do to set up different structures and rigs. That being said, once you do it the capability to create version after version is awesome. Here are some caveats/suggestions for the future:
- Shifting time works on text, nulls, adjustment layers and footage but doesn't work on shape layers which is frustrating.
- Animating things in works great since you can just shift the layer start time to where you want but animating things out is a pain that requires expressions, nulls and a lot of creative thinking. Having the option to stick keyframes to the layer end point would be super useful.
- More options for interpreting footage would be excellent. Something like "always use sRGB" or "always play back at 30fps" would make this a lot more flexible.
- If you have a lot going on, it can be slooooowww to update/preview next row. I don't know what the bottleneck is but would appreciate improvement.
Say I have a template that has dropdown menus built in for ratings pips (eg: 3/5 stars etc)? How do you set up a spreadsheet to deal with that data? Like how would I represent that in a template CSV?
There are a few different ways that you could tackle this sort of problem. The most basic would be to create an Expression that allows you to control the dropdown value based on information from a cell in the spreadsheet.
For this example, let's say we have a menu named "Dropdown" with three options. The first thing we'll need to do is add a new value to our spreadsheet to control whether the dropdown is set to 1, 2, or 3. Let's call this column "selection". Next, we'll need to add a new text layer to the project, rename it to "selection" (with no quotes), and then apply the Templater Effect. Once we've verified that the spreadsheet data is being mapped to the "selection" layer, we'll want to add this Expression:
to the "Dropdown" layer. This can be accomplished by ALT/Option-clicking on the "Menu" property and pasting the code into the field that comes up.
This should tell the "Dropdown" menu to look at the number in the "selection" layer and set the dropdown to the appropriate value. We'll obviously need to adjust the Expression to point to the correct layer, but other than that, this should work for what you're describing.
However, it should be pointed out that this solution is a bit cumbersome since Templater will have to bring data into one layer to set an option in another, which will (most likely) adjust additional details elsewhere in the project.
If you want to streamline this process, I'd recommend removing the dropdown entirely and instead using the Templater text layer to control whatever the dropdown was changing directly. This might require creating some new Expressions or altering the existing setup, but it might end up being less error-prone and faster in the long run.
Hopefully, that all makes sense, but if you run into any issues, please feel free to get in touch with us.
Thanks for getting in touch with us. While Templater doesn't have any specific functions to reverse-fill a Google Drive from data in an aep project file, a cursory search returned a couple of plugins that might work for this application.
Text2Spreadsheet (located here) seems to be a pretty solid lightweight application that will automatically export all the text layers from a project to a format that can be imported into a Google Drive document. If we need both text and footage references, I believe that pt_OpenSesame (located here) has that functionality.
Both programs seem to export the project data in a way that might require some additional reformatting before it can be used with Templater, but one of these plugins will probably be enough to get things started.
The time sculpting features look really cool, but is it possible to manipulate time data from a spreadsheet?
Use case: I have a client who needs to extract different clips from a podcast. He would like to have time data in his spreadsheet (e.g., TC in: 00:30:00:00 and TC out: 00:45:00:00) so that AE/Templater can do the rest (trim the podcast at the right time and also the comp).
The scenario that you've described should absolutely be possible using our plugin. Templater Bot has a feature called Event Scripts that can be used to run custom code at various points throughout the reversioning process. These scripts can be used to create a variety of custom actions based on variables harvested from Templater's data source.
So, with that in mind, it should be possible to create a script that gets the time codes from the Data Source. Once those variables have been read, it should be possible to create an Extendscript that adjusts a layer's inPoint and outPoint to the appropriate time codes.
To get started, I'd recommend taking a look at these articles on Event Scripts from our support website:
Additionally, this post from our forums has some Extendscript code that might make for a good starting point for what you're trying to achieve. We'd need to replace the startTime option with an inPoint statement, but hopefully, this will get things moving in the right direction.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly on our forums or through our standard support channels.
The easiest way to explain the difference between Templater Pro and Templater Bot will probably be by describing how each version handles large data sets.
Templater Pro was designed to process large batches all at once, so when the automation process is started, Pro will read the entire data set and then begin the reversioning process. This means that if a data set is extremely large or dense, it can cause a significant delay when Templater Pro first spins up since it needs to read all of the data before it's able to start.
Templater Bot, on the other hand, was designed to operate indefinitely, monitoring a data source for new data and processing it as needed. This means that Templater Bot has tools that allow it to ingest data sets a bit at a time rather than all at once. So, Templater Bot can essentially process an unlimited amount of data since it can be read in bit by bit.
When it comes to what constitutes a "significant size," it's difficult to put an exact number on it since the density of each individual job can also play a part in how large our overall data set is. However, generally speaking, if we're looking to process several hundred Jobs, Templater Pro will almost certainly be fine. Once we get up into the high hundreds or thousands, we'll probably want to split those data sets into separate jobs or go with Templater Bot.
Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any follow-up questions, please just let us know.
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Glad that you found a solution! Since Text Animators can use Templater layers as variable data for AE Expressions, they're going to the best bet for customizing text properties in the way that you've described. If you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know. Thanks!
This app is blocked
This app tried to access sensitive info in your Google Account. To keep your account safe, Google blocked this access.
Im using v3.0 of the plugin
Hey everyone,
Thanks for your patience. It looks like the issue has been resolved on Google's side, and you should be able to authenticate with your account. Give it a shot, and let us know if you have any issues. Otherwise, you should be good to go!
Happy rendering!
Say I have a template that has dropdown menus built in for ratings pips (eg: 3/5 stars etc)? How do you set up a spreadsheet to deal with that data? Like how would I represent that in a template CSV?
Juanca,
Thanks for getting in touch with us. While Templater doesn't have any specific functions to reverse-fill a Google Drive from data in an aep project file, a cursory search returned a couple of plugins that might work for this application.
Text2Spreadsheet (located here) seems to be a pretty solid lightweight application that will automatically export all the text layers from a project to a format that can be imported into a Google Drive document. If we need both text and footage references, I believe that pt_OpenSesame (located here) has that functionality.
Both programs seem to export the project data in a way that might require some additional reformatting before it can be used with Templater, but one of these plugins will probably be enough to get things started.
Thanks!
Hello,
The time sculpting features look really cool, but is it possible to manipulate time data from a spreadsheet?
Use case: I have a client who needs to extract different clips from a podcast. He would like to have time data in his spreadsheet (e.g., TC in: 00:30:00:00 and TC out: 00:45:00:00) so that AE/Templater can do the rest (trim the podcast at the right time and also the comp).
One of the features exclusive to the Bot version says "Use The Bot for Templater to automatically replicate or render data sets of a significant size"
Can you elaborate what that means? What exactly is "a significant size"? What is Templater Pro actually capable of?
Thanks!