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

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

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

@francisco-santos

Hello!

Our best bet to see what’s happening here is going to be to check what’s being written to the templater.log and templater.err files. The .log file should give us a better idea of what’s happening behind the scenes when Templater attempts to swap in the new media, and the .err file should contain any After Effects errors that might be present during the reversioning process.

If you’d prefer to send those files to us directly, please feel free to drop us a line at support@dataclay.com. Otherwise, I’d recommend starting by examining the templater.err file to see if there are any obvious errors there that could point us toward the cause of the problem.

Hopefully, that’ll get us moving in the right direction so we can resolve this issue and get you up and running.

Thanks,

Jeff

@Ridvan

Thanks for getting in touch with us. We’re currently working on integrating native srt support into the next version of Templater. Once set up, this process would be very similar to the way that Templater already reversions other assets, like footage or text.

We currently have a method to support .srt file-swapping in Templater, but it does require some customization to get up and running. You can check that out at this link on our GitHub Page.

Hopefully, that helps, but if there’s anything else we can do to help, please feel free to reach out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@eric_dean

If I’m understanding the situation correctly, the issue here is that we’re swapping an asset with a lot of frame data (our movie) out with an asset that basically has none (our image).

The main problem here is that, to After Effects, an image only has a single frame of image data, so if we have the “Preserve Start” and “Preserve End” options checked, it would naturally reduce that layer down to one frame, the way you described.

In the scenario where we needed to resize a still image, we’d typically suggest using the “Stretch” option to conform that image to another “timing” layer to stretch it out, but that would cause issues if we swapped the image back to a video asset since we wouldn’t want that asset to conform to the same “timing” layer as the image.

Given all this, I think that the solution you’ve described, where you’re swapping between precomps that are specifically set up for a video or still image, makes a lot of sense and is what we’d typically recommend. It might be possible to use some kind of ExtendScript to detect the file type of the layer and then alter it accordingly, but that would almost certainly be more complicated and error-prone, especially since we’ve already got a solution in place.

Hopefully, that makes sense, but if you encounter any other issues, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks,

Jeff

@ermalr

If you continue to have issues with speed and performance over time, I’d recommend getting in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com so we can get some more specific details on how the project is configured.

Outside of enabling the “Remove unused footage after each job” and “Purge all memory caches after each job” in the Templater Preferences panel, as @ariestav mentioned, it might be necessary to take a look at the templater.log file to see if we can narrow down exactly where the issue is occurring.

Let’s start by enabling those options, and if we still run into issues, go ahead and send us a message, and we’ll see if we can’t make some more specific suggestions based on the project’s operating environment.

Thanks,

Jeff

@pbretz

There shouldn’t be any need to manually delete Jobs before removing a Campaign in QUE. Deleting the Campaign should take care of all of the underlying Jobs contained in the Campaign without the need to remove anything individually.

As far as bulk deleting Jobs goes, there shouldn’t be any limit on the number of Jobs that can be marked and deleted in a single action. It might take some time to delete an especially large number of Jobs all at once, but there shouldn’t be any technical reason why it can’t be done.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you run into any issues, please let us know, and we’ll do whatever we can to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

The Dataclay team has released Templater 3.3.3, which primarily addresses a bug where Templater couldn’t load assets that were hosted in remote locations.

Enjoy!

WHAT’S NEW IN 3.3.3

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue that prevented Templater from loading assets stored in remote locations.

  Templater had difficulties downloading assets that were hosted remotely and referenced in Templater data with a URL. This issue primarily affected users who had After Effects installed on a non-system drive. With this fix, Templater will be able to access remotely hosted footage as intended.