v3.0 Dataclay Templater Rig

Easily customize video with an elegant and streamlined workflow solution.

Templater is an Adobe® After Effects® plugin that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating customized videos. It empowers you to quickly and easily produce a large volume of beautiful videos that will resonate with your audience.

Dataclay Templater Rig lets you easily customize videos with an elegant and streamlined workflow solution. Available editions Templater Pro and Templater Bot extend Templater Rig for desktop automation and full server automation.

New in Templater 3: Quality control tools, native MFR and Apple M1, use expressions for responsive layout and integration with Dataclay QUE.

Dataclay Templater Rig Highlights

Templater Features

What is Templater?

Templater turns the arduous task of customizing video content into an elegant workflow solution. Users automate AE project customization with a simple interface that transforms text, footage, and solid layers into dynamic elements. Templater is design aware, automatically adjusting dynamic elements to produce a finely crafted result just the way you like.

Purpose

Templater was made to improve the process and workflow of producing targeted video based on various external data sources. As organizations mine and store more information, they need ways of leveraging this data to create meaningful connections with customers in markets across the world. Big data can drive media content, but video producers need a way to easily insert information into custom video without tediously replacing assets.

Templater Editions

Templater is available in three separate editions—Rig, Pro, and Bot. Each ships with a specific feature set. Read our handy descriptions below to see which edition or combination of editions is right for your organization. Learn more about Templater Pro and Templater Bot on their respective catalog pages.

New in Templater 3

• Integration with Dataclay QUE – an API to manage dynamic video data and render tasks.
• Quality control batch output with “Spot Checks” – auto-exported still images of your dynamic comps.
• Use expressions to build unique responsive layouts in favor of Templater’s internal layout engine.
• Support for Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects 2022 and later.
• Native Apple Silicon support.

How It Works

• An effect plugin and a ScriptUI panel are installed into AE.
• Users feed customization data into After Effects from a data source. Templater can read Google Sheets documents, JSON object arrays in text files, or tab-separated value files.
• Users tag layers as dynamic with the custom effect and map data to those layers.
• For each row in a spreadsheet or object in a JSON array, Templater updates each tagged layer with its mapped data.
• Templater’s layout engine automatically adjusts dynamic layers to produce a finely crafted composition that is either rendered or replicated.
• Users take advantage of either Templater’s graphical user interface or The Bot and its command line interface to achieve results.

Suggested Uses

• Customizing television network branding graphics
• Integrating social media content into video
• Localizing text to be rendered into video
• Personalizing ads and communication campaigns
• Producing video content for e-commerce platforms
• Producing video content for digital signage
• Creating video slates and slideshows at live events
• Customizing video slideshows of photo streams
• Creating motion graphic material for video art
• Quality assuring video templates

Feature Descriptions

Versatile

Map your spreadsheet or JSON data directly into AE composition layers. Use Google Sheets in the cloud or tabbed-separated-value files exported from Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or Google Sheets. You can also use a plain text file containing a JSON object array exported from your own app.

Intelligent

When updating an AE composition with your data, Templater intelligently adjusts dynamic layers relative to their containing composition and other sibling layers. No need to futz with aligning, scaling, or positioning dynamic layers—let Templater craft your composition according to your layout rules.

Timely

Use time-based rules to crop, trim, shift, and stretch layers using Templater’s patent-pending Time Sculpting feature. There’s no need to worry about integrating footage sources of varying duration into a video template. Now Templater can maintain the design integrity of your video while processing footage of different lengths.

Global

Insert characters from any language into your spreadsheet and see them appear in your text layers. Of course, installed fonts should have the glyphs you require. Templater reads your text as it appears in your spreadsheet, so commas, quotes, apostrophes, and new lines are accepted. Right-to-left scripts are also supported.

Iterative

With a click of a button, preview how your data-driven compositions will look prior to rendering or replicating. Iterate through previews of your render jobs to see how Templater treats different text, footage, and colors. Resolve problematic data quickly and effectively.

Efficient

Pro & Bot Only — Templater churns out many unique renders very efficiently. Choose to render all the rows in your spreadsheet or just a range. You can apply AE output modules and render settings templates to batch jobs and customize output names.

Industrious

Pro & Bot Only — Templater can quickly re-version a master composition with your data and replicate it so you can work your mograph magic on it before rendering. Replicated comps are kept tidy and organized within a clean folder structure. You also have the option to send replicated comps to AE’s render queue or the Adobe Media Encoder.

Automatic

Bot Only — The Bot for Templater operates After Effects for you. When The Bot finds new data, it triggers Templater’s customization and rendering process. Developers can create web or mobile apps that feed data into Templater’s data source, offering a collaborative, custom video content creation solution. In addition, you can use shell scripts to automatically handle post-rendering tasks.

Powerful

Bot Only — Engage with Templater processes through shell commands. With the command line interface (CLI), developers have unparalleled flexibility for integrating video versioning within their existing pipelines or systems. Most controls found in the Templater Panel are configurable via a command line options file.

Transparent

Want to know what Templater is doing at any given time? Inspect its log files for full transparency. Troubleshooting Templater has never been easier.

Support & Services

Standard Support

Good documentation is essential for a smooth user experience. We’ve done our best to ensure ours is as thorough and as clear as possible. Should you encounter any problems, visit Dataclay’s support site to search through our extensive online help. Learn basic concepts and follow step-by-step instructions to get started.

We also have many screencasts which you can find in the Videos tab on this page. Screencasts show many different techniques and real-world examples using existing templates. While some demonstrate with Templater 1 and 2, they are still relevant to Templater 3. Use the screencasts in combination with the documentation for the most effective learning experience.

If you have difficulty getting Templater to work for you after searching the documentation and reviewing the screencasts, we are here to help. Dataclay provides technical support via web and email to registered owners of Templater licenses through the help-ticket system here on aescripts.com. Submit a ticket with your question, and we will respond within three business days. For pre-sales questions, feel free to use the comments tab on this page.
Dataclay Consulting Services

Dataclay offers consulting services and managed solutions for studios, agencies, broadcast networks, live event producers or any company with a need to produce customized video content from AE templates. Visit our author page to contact us if your team needs help to do the following:

• Prepare an existing After Effects project file for compatibility with Templater
• Optimize existing templates for efficient batch rendering
• Integrate data from your existing source for use with Templater
• Architect rendering farms for use with Templater
• Distribute video content after performing versioning and rendering tasks