@pbretz Yes, that would be an option. I’m pretty confident that it’s an issue specific to Google Sheets and not a “bot” value, generally.

@RobAranter Do you have any special characters in the title of your Google Sheet?

It could also be something to do with your Google Account, or with the authorization that Templater had previously retrieved. Can you try signing back into the problematic account in the Google Sheets Setup?

@ariestav Any update on the bug?

EDIT: It’s now becoming a bigger and bigger issue. It now hangs for about 2 minutes when pulling in data from the JSON source. It is getting to the point where we are looking at no longer using templater bot, as we haven’t had any indication this will be fixed.

@cristian

Thanks for the update. Are the new comps being created when you preview the next row in your data set? Or is this happening when you hit the “replicate” button in Templater? Templater won’t typically create new precomps when swapping between assets, so we need to narrow down how exactly this project is laid out.

Could you outline the steps one by one that led to the behavior that you’re seeing? Hopefully, that’ll give us a better picture of what exactly is happening. You can also get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com if you’d like to share these details in a more direct message.

Let us know what you can, and we’ll take it from there. Thanks!

@jeff Yes! This is it! Thanks, everyone.

Pete,

I’m thinking that you’re correct in assuming that this probably has to do with After Effects getting tripped up by the file getting swapped but AE using a cached version of the old file. Unfortunately, this isn’t a super common issue, so we’ll probably need to dive deeper into the specifics. I’d like to know a bit more about where the audio files are stored. Is this local footage, or are they being downloaded from a URL? If the source is remote, could you check and see if the “Allow unique downloads for cloud-based assets” box is checked in the Templater Preferences? If the assets are local, I think that getting access to the templater.log file would probably be the best next step so we can see if there’s something obvious happening behind the scenes.

Thanks,

Jeff

Wow - can’t wait to try this!

@Junior The JSON files that Templater generates in that folder can be ignored. They aren’t relevant to what you’re doing. You will want to still remove any that got imported into the Project panel in your AEP file, as those can cause errors.

You can have the project file and the replicated AEP files or videos in separate locations. The two are independent. In addition, you can also have the AME watch folder be in a completely different location from AME’s output folder. AME defaults to sorting the files it is processing into a source and an output folder within the main destination that you are watching, but you can set those to be separated.

@surabhiv

At the moment, Templater Bot can only be set up to automate either video production or Spot Checking, so if you’d like to have both actions automated, you’ll need to look into running two separate versions of Templater. There is a Reserved Column that Templater recognizes named bot that will allow you to designate which Bot should process each line of data in your data source. Using this feature, you should be able to route preview actions to one Bot to perform Spot Checks and render actions to another that can do render/replication actions.

@cmoyer

Testing the collapse transformations issue, it looks like any effect (not limited to the Templater Settings effect) that you apply to that precomp will break or change your collapse transformation in unexpected ways. There is something weird happening in the way that AE applies effects to collapsed precomps. I’m not entirely sure of a way around this issue.

From Adobe’s help (with my highlights):

“When a closed mask (with mask mode other than None), a layer style, or an effect is applied to a nested composition with collapsed transformations, the layers in the nested composition are first rendered on their own, then masks and effects are applied, and then the result is composited into the main composition. This rendering order means that the blending modes of the nested layers are not applied to any underlying layers in the main composition, and that 3D layers above and below the collapsed layer cannot intersect or cast shadows on each other.”

hi there

Did anyone work this out?

We have 10 comps with the same information in. Name, Date, Venue.

Is there a way not to have to name each layer Name1, Name2, Name3? S0 the excel spreadsheet only looks at row 1 so you end up having a massive long line on row 1

I just want to have:

Column 1 - Driver
Column 2 - Date
Column 3 - Venue

Does that make sense?

@pbretz It’s probably difficult to do without some kind of math if your timeline is moving around a lot, but since you can pass data values to be arguments in an event script incantation, you could pass a time/timecode value into a script to extract key frames as stills using the above mentioned methods.

@dwalters There are videos demonstrating setting a target as well as switching between project files. For data in expressions, see the link in my previous post under the section “referencing dynamic text layers.”

@Neil-González Have you added those to the process exceptions list? Is there a separate file blocking area that you can add them to a permanent whitelist? I’m not directly familiar with Trend Micro’s interface.

Thanks Jon!

Thanks Jeff!

@rdbs

I apologize; my last response was a bit garbled. Templater Rig should be able to use the same Time Sculpting features as Pro and Bot. Those options would probably be your best bet when it comes to customizing the comp duration. Let us know if you have any further questions. Thanks!

Thanks Jeff!

Great to hear! Happy Rendering!

@tasnadi-otto

OK. I think this will work for what you’re trying to do:

var compName = $D.job.get("compname"); var layerName = $D.job.get("layername"); var layerTime = $D.job.get("time"); var myComp; for (var i = 1; i <= app.project.numItems; i ++) { if ((app.project.item(i) instanceof CompItem) && (app.project.item(i).name === compName)) { myComp = app.project.item(i); break; } } myComp.layer(layerName).startTime = layerTime;

I’ll explain the methodology briefly here so that you can adjust as needed. The comp name is set by the “compname” field in the data source (more on that in a second), the layer by “layername”, the time value by “time”. These values can obviously be altered to fit your project as needed.

The code that begins with var myComp; is essentially a quick loop that searches your Project for the text outlined in the compName variable and returns the index value. That way, you can pick the comp using plain text rather than an index. The layer name within the comp can be designated by text, so that’s what the layerName variable is for.

I tested this on the “Before layers update” event, and it seemed to work without an issue. It’s possible there might be some issues if you have a huge number of layers that all need updating, but this should be a good starting point. If you run into trouble, feel free to let us know, and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks!