@jeff Hey Jeff, thanks for getting back.

Arie has already upvoted my Adobe Forum Post so i figured you were taking a look at things.
We are rebooting our machines every night because we have experienced issues with AE instances that ran for a long time.

I think the crashes are cause by either the tasked reboot force quitting AE or by the fact that we have three instances of Templater Bot running the same project at once and the way that AE checks for chashes is some kind of quit statement in the projectfile itself.

Because once one project is opened, we get the Crash Options dialogue on instance 2 and 3 (run with the -m parameter).

Instance 2 and 3 generate on demand previews that are shown to the creators in our frontend. We are running two instances to speed up the polling of our json data (still limited to 0.2 min) to have a result asap.

I guess the issue is with having the same project open multiple times.

I could fork a “preview project” but i really dont want to do that everytime there are updates to the template.

I just want adobe to not fk with my day :(

At the moment i’m thinking of going back to 23.1 or 23.0 and just disabling updates.

Thank you. Where can I find the templater preferences?

Found it, thanks!

@citizensam

I’m unsure if I understand what we’re looking to accomplish here. I can say that Templater doesn’t support XML data files by default, but it does have support for PNG sequences.

Can we get a few more details on how this project is set up? What is meant when you say that each XML is a different PNG sequence? The more detail we can get on what you’re attempting to accomplish, the better we’ll be able to formulate a suggestion.

Let us know what you can and we’ll see where we need to go from there.

Thanks,

Jeff

@jeff That makes sense. And unfortunately the aspect ratio is different for all the sizes, so it’s not as simple as just scaling the video.

I’m going to make another post to see if anyone here uses Coda.io to generate JSON files. We use Coda with our client to submit project requests, so I’m thinking I may be able to make a document with that service to make a JSON file with all the variations.

Thanks again for your help.

@citizensam

Absolutely! New settings can be added to the “Render Settings” or “Output Module” through the existing After Effects tools located under the Edit>Templates menu. Once the new options are added, they should show up in the Templater panel once the “Load Settings & Module Templates” button is pressed.

As a quick side note, it might also be useful to use the module and render-settings reserved columns to set the output settings using information from the Data Source the project is using. As long as the data in these two columns match up with valid options in the “Render Settings” and “Output Module” options in AE, Templater should use them when each row is processed. This can be useful if we need to switch between different output modules on the fly.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you run into any issues, please feel free to get in touch, and we’ll do whatever we can to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@jeff Thanks for the reply, Jeff.

@veteos Glad to hear that’s resolved, and that it was an easy fix!

@ben-forman said in Best Way to Template Subtitle Track:

@jon said in Best Way to Template Subtitle Track:

So the line endings on Mac might work best as CR (rather than CRLF or LF). Sublime should let you change the line endings, too.

Can you clarify what this means? Am I changing characters? Changing encodings?

LF, CR, and CRLF are platform-specific “line-endings”—they tell the OS where a given line of text or code ends and a new one starts. The behavior where it was displaying all of the subtitle text at once is because AE and the OS aren’t correctly interpreting where each line ends.

UTF-8 is a text character encoding—numerical representations of a graphical character/shape. There are also others like ASCII, UTF-16.

The files in the GitHub repo are already UTF-8. When I created them on Windows, the files had CRLF line endings, but git automatically converted them to LF line endings upon uploading.

I am on Windows and an older version of Sublime, but this is what it looks like on my menu. Save after changing.

16d599cd-5194-4739-9b26-e6bd1e38e708-image.png

@falrinth

It’s an interesting idea! I’m not sure if it would be 100% workable, since Adobe’s handling of text layers can be a bit odd, but we can certainly consider the request. In the meantime, there is a technique we’ve used in the past that might help with this particular scenario.

Basically, we could use an After Effects Expression to change the font according to a text value specified in the Data Source. To accomplish this, we’d want to start by creating a new text layer and connecting it to Templater. Once that’s done and we can verify the font name is being loaded, we can then apply this Expression:

text.sourceText.style.setFont(comp("Globals").layer("Font01").text.sourceText);

to the “Source Text” value of any text layer whose font we wanted to change. We’d need to change "Globals" to the comp that contains the layer and "Font01" to the layer name, but once that’s done, AE should read the font name from the Data Source and adjust any text layers accordingly.

We’ve also used this technique to pre-emptively keep After Effects from reverting to the default font by proactively swapping over to one that can support the characters in question so that no error occurs during the render/replication process.

The only catch to this method is that the font name in the Data Source must match AE’s listing exactly, or the font will be unable to load. The easiest way to locate the exact font name is to create a new text layer, expand the “Source Text” section, and click the small “play” button next to the pickwhip. This should bring up a menu. Navigate to Text>Font and choose the font you want to use. That should populate the text layer with the exact name of the font/style that After Effects uses.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to run them by us.

Thanks!

@jeff Thank you Jeff. Taking one part of the custom name directly from AE was the stuff i was looking for, so i can use output column in google sheets that would be combined by Templater with AE’s compositions’ names, but its not a big deal. Just thought it might be possible, since plugin is all about automating stuff. If for some reason its hard to do, its not a big problem.

@videohoney did Jeff’s suggestion help? From the screenshot, the expression is likely working, but you have to shorten the length of the audio track (or extend the length of the comp) for the fade to work correctly. Also, the audio.audioLevels on the first line of your expression shouldn’t be included.

@dwalters

The most common cause for the error shown in the screenshot is, more often than not, attempting to authenticate using an older version of Templater. Google made a change to the authentication method that their API uses to grant apps access to Google Sheets last year. Due to this change, previous versions of Templater will no longer be able to sign in to Google Sheets.

The first thing I’d try is updating to the latest version of Templater. You can download the installer for Templater Standard (for AE 2022 and above) from this link:

https://assets.dataclay.com/Templater3.zip

and Templater Legacy (For AE 2021 and below) here:

https://assets.dataclay.com/Templater3-Legacy.zip

Hopefully, that’s all we should need to get things up and running, but if you run into further issues, just let us know, and we’ll see where we need to go from there.

Thanks!

@viriato

The terminal window in that screenshot is an indication that Templater Bot is executing an Event Script at some point during the versioning process. Typically, when a Shell Script is registered to an event, it’ll be wrapped up in a command named templater-event-cmd.bat and run at the appropriate time during the Templater process.

If this window is causing the process to hang up or fail, it likely has to do with one of the registered Event Scripts in Templater Bot. In order to figure out what’s happening here, we’ll likely need to take a look at any Shell Scripts registered with Templater. We’ll also need to see how those scripts are being invoked to get a clearer idea of what could be causing the issue.

If you’d like, you can post that information here, but if you’d like to get in touch with us directly so as not to share this data on a public forum, you can always email us at support@dataclay.com.

Hopefully, with a bit more information on how things are configured, we should be able to track down what’s causing this issue.

Thanks!

@pbretz

It can depend quite a bit on how your systems are configured, but I’ll try and outline the basics here. To run Event Scripts, the first thing you’ll need is a copy of Templater Bot. Event Scripts are only available on this version of Templater, so if you’re using Pro or Rig, this won’t be an option.

Once you’ve got Bot set up, head to the Templater Preferences window and click on “Setup ExtendScripts”. From there, you should get a box that will allow you to choose which Templater event you’d like to use to trigger the Event Script.

When I tested the script outlined above, I registered it on the “After layers update” event under “Layer Processing”. This instructs the script to run after any data versioning and Time Sculpting have been applied to the project.

If you’re running Templater via CLI, you’ll want to specify the script you’d like to run in the templater-options.json file on the appropriate Event. In this case, you’d want to add it to the “post_cmd_update” event.

Those are the basics, but more information can be found in this article from our support website. Additionally, we have some example scripts on our GitHub Page located here.

If you run into any hurdles or if we can answer any questions, just let us know!

Thanks!

Yeah, got it to work, had to select one of the jobs first, and then all columns showed :) This is great, I’m really starting to love QUE as much as I do Templater :-)

@pbretz

The jobs being left in a state of “processing” in Google Sheets is actually a bug left over from the way the Google API updates when footage is missing. Technically speaking, the render-status should be changed to “done” in the Google Sheets since it completes the Job with the option set in the Templater Preferences dialog.

This was a scenario we likely should have envisioned in the past, but our assumption was that customers would use Spot Checks rather than the render-status to check for outputs with missing footage.

Either way, we’ll see about implementing some sort of flag to indicate Jobs that complete with missing assets.

Thanks,

Jeff

@pbretz Hi Pete, I checked in and it looks like we’ve got it fairly high on our list, and we’re eyeing early next year for release. I don’t have an exact timeframe, but hopefully in the first few months.

@rkvalvaa

Glad to hear it. If you have any other questions or run into any other issues, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks!