@snowfall0988 We looked into this issue a bit. It turns out that in 3.4.0 Time Sculpting requires the designation of a target composition for it to work. Plus, Templater now no longer “sculpts” any other composition outside of the target comp. This means that the target and any pre-comp layers within that target get “sculpted”.

Can you please confirm that you have a target composition selected and let us know if the time sculpting works for that particular composition in your project?

Learn more about setting a target comp within your project in this support article. It’s best practice to wrap a composition’s name within double braces {{ }} to designate your project’s target.

Looking forward to learning more about your setup!

@snowfall0988 while we investigate, you can download 3.3.3 here.

We have received some reports about Time Sculpting not working properly in the 3.4.0 release. In addition, some users are reporting strange characters displaying within Templater’s user interface when working with non-English installations of After Effects when using this particular release.

We are investigating both issues. If you have a particular Time Sculpted project that worked in Templater 3.3.3 but no longer function as expected in Templater 3.4.0, please submit a support ticket by emailing support@dataclay.com

Thank you for your patience as we work to identify the issues, their causes, and work to remedy them.

@snowfall0988 We have heard reports of this and are looking into it. Can you please send us a message to support@dataclay.com with more information about your project so we can understand it better.

Thanks,
Arie

The Dataclay team has just released Templater version 3.4.0, which adds some exciting new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Thank you for being so patient. Enjoy!

WHAT’S NEW IN 3.4

Templater 3.4 offers several new features, significant UI changes in Templater Preferences, and two new events that can be scripted against.

• Templater Autograf Rigging Utilities and Dynamic Subtitles

  Autograf Rigging Utilities are purpose-built utilities for common applications of customized video compositions and replicates.

  The first utility to be released by Dataclay is Dynamic Subtitles. This utility enables users to automate the addition of closed captions, translations, audio descriptions, and other onscreen text. The result it is a substantial increase the production speed for videos which require subtitles.

  Additional rigging utilities are planned for future releases. Developers can even create their own rigging utilities and optionally share these with the Templater community.

• Dynamic Text Styling

  Taking full advantage of After Effects 2024 capabilities, Templater now supports dynamic text styling. With this release, the font-face and direction properties can be styled directly from your data source. Support for additional properties is planned for future releases.

• Time Sculpting Preview Focus

  A new setting is available in Templater Preferences for customers who use Time Sculpting. This setting helps you better see the effects of your Time Sculpting setup when previewing target compositions. Because this setting has a major effect on the author experience, it is disabled by default and should only be used with Time Sculpting.

• Reorganized Settings in Templater Preferences Dialog

  The Templater Preferences dialog has been reorganized and streamlined to make it easier for you to configure settings. The configurable options have not changed, just their presentation.

• New Templater Event: Footage Download

  The new footage download event can be used in Shell Scripts, ExtendScripts, and the command line interface (CLI) where needed. This makes it easier for users to apply their own pre- or post-download processing before updating the target composition. This event only applies to remote footage.

• New Templater Event: Footage Processing

  The new footage processing event can be used in Shell Scripts, ExtendScripts, and the command line interface (CLI) where needed. This makes it easier for users to apply their own processing pre- or post-AE and Templater video processing before updating the target composition. This event applies to both local and remote footage. It does not apply to footage created within the AE project file (that is, footage that is itself an AE comp).

• Feature Enhancement: Flags

  Flags let you manipulate some properties of dynamic layers from within your data sources. Users can now wrap terms used as flags in either double braces {{ }} or double brackets [[ ]]. Previously, only double braces could be used.

• New Reserved Column and Property Names

  With introduction of Dynamic Subtitles, there are three new reserved column names: srt-data, srt-bg, srt-display

• New Bot Property Keys for Templater Events

  In support of the new Footage Download and Footage Processing events, there are 12 new Bot property keys for use in the command line interface (CLI):

  • pre_cmd_ftg
  • pre_cmd_ftg_async
  • pre_jsx_ftg
  • pre_cmd_dl
  • pre_cmd_dl_async
  • pre_jsx_dl
  • post_cmd_ftg
  • post_cmd_ftg_async
  • post_jsx_ftg
  • post_cmd_dl
  • post_cmd_dl_async
  • post_jsx_dl
     

• New Pre-defined Argument Macros for Shell Scripts

  In support of the new Footage Download and Footage Processing events, there are 11 new pre-defined argument macros for use in shell scripts:

  • $dl_file_uri
  • $dl_file_name
  • $dl_file_dir
  • $dl_file_mime
  • $dl_file_ext
  • $dl_file
  • $ftg_layer
  • $ftg_name
  • $ftg_file
  • $ftg_dir
  • $ftg_ext
     

• New Object Methods for ExtendScript API

  In support of the new Footage Download and Footage Processing events, there are four new object methods for use in ExtendScripts:

  • $D.download()
  • $D.footage.layer()
  • $D.footage.source()
  • $D.footage.item()

FIXES in 3.4.0

• The following issues have been fixed in this release:

  • With the release of After Effects 24.3, an intrusive confirmation dialog would spawn if the “Purge all memory caches after each job” was enabled.

  • The Templater Time Sculpting algorithm broke when nested compositions were part of its layer reconfiguration.

  • In scenarios where an audio-only layer with a Templater Settings effect applied to it had time-based parameters configured to monitor sibling layers, users received this unwanted After Effects error dialog: After Effects invalid image buffer size (0x0) (37 :: 102).

  • In a particular scenario, the Templater layout algorithm broke and cascaded throughout the After Effects project. This happened if a composition contained both layers that can not have effects applied, such as Camera or Light layers, together with layers assigned to a Templater layer group.

@pbretz The way to architect this would be to have web hooks that broadcast events on QUE, but in Sheets there is no easy way to do that. However, for sheets you might be able to use zapier to ping the sheet every so often to check for specific values in the render-status column. You could do the same with QUE and Zapier. We do have webhooks on the roadmap for QUE this year, but no set date.

@pbretz

Unfortunately, there currently isn’t an event that would denote that no more Jobs are left in the Data Source. This is mainly due to the way that Bot and Pro are set up to operate. Since Templater Bot is largely expected to run indefinitely, we typically wouldn’t be checking for a scenario where there were no Jobs left to run.

It might be possible to run a synchronous script that would act as a timer and run an operation if a certain amount of time has passed since the end of the last Job, but that’s the only thing I can think of that might work for the scenario described.

If we knew a bit more about what we wanted the script to do when no more Jobs were present, that might help, but at the moment, no specific Event is broadcast by Templater that matches this scenario.

If we can help out in any other way, please feel free to let us know, and we’ll do whatever we can.

Thanks,

Jeff

@UncleMonty To follow on Jeff’s replies, in case you are using an earlier version of Templater 3, it’s recommended to run the Templater uninstaller and download and install Templater from one of those links he provided. The zip names are going to be the same, but the contents will be different—which is why you’ll want to install from a fresh download.

@UncleMonty

A quick update on this. Our engineering staff informed me that we removed D_curl.exe a few versions back when we switched over to a new authentication method. If you need the latest version of Templater, you can download 3.3.3 from this link:

If you need the Legacy version of Templater for AE 2021 or earlier, you can grab that here:

Hopefully, that should resolve any security issues with Windows Defender, but if you have any other problems or questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks,

Jeff

@UncleMonty

Hello!

D_curl.exe is the part of Templater that transmits and receives data during the reversioning process. That can potentially set off some virus and malware scanners that misidentify the component as some sort of malware or ransomware. However, we’ve been digitally signing our utility executables for a while now, so we wouldn’t typically expect this to be the case with the latest versions of the plugin.

Which version of Templater are we running that’s giving us that error? If it’s an earlier version, you should be able to disregard those notifications from Windows Defender. If it’s a newer version, let us know, and we’ll look into it to see if we can keep this behavior from manifesting in future versions.

Thanks,

Jeff