And the Emmy® goes to…
The creative staff at the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) has their hands full producing graphics across multiple platforms for Emmy Award videos. These still and motion graphics are heavily data driven, consisting of the hundreds of award categories and names of winners.
Generating the multitude of animated motion graphics needed for every awards season has been a time consuming manual process in the past, but starting this year, the creative team at NATAS have been leveraging Dataclay’s Templater® for Adobe® After Effects®.
With Templater, the creative team at NATAS can automate the process of customizing video content, turning a traditionally arduous task into an efficient workflow. Templater allows users to link After Effects compositions to external data sources. This means that the award categories and names of winners can be automatically populated into the graphics, ensuring consistent branding across all of their videos. The Templater plugin integrates directly into After Effects, fitting seamlessly into the team’s existing workflow.
Templater is designed to help content creators maximize their video messaging by efficiently customizing and personalizing content. Templater allows users to create dynamic text that updates based on external data sources. This enables the NATAS team to generate personalized video content at scale. Templater can also read data from various sources including flat tab-delimited files, Google Sheets documents, or JSON-formatted text files. Furthermore, with Templater, one template can become many different videos without requiring a lot of extra time.
- Time Sculpting: Templater includes time sculpting rules that enable layers of a video composition to be linked or modified in a content-aware way. This ensures compositions remain coherent when content is altered or substituted. These rules allow users to define video composition templates with layers of variable time duration. The rules can be evaluated when a digital compositing platform creates a composition based on the layers and rules defined for the composition.
- Dynamic Text: Templater‘s dynamic text styling allows for changes to font-face and text direction based on data. By combining After Effects’ text tools with Templater, they can create dynamic text that updates based on external data sources using custom expressions and scripts to apply specific formatting parameters. This allows for the creation of highly personalized and localized video content. Templater can be used to customize network branding graphics such as stings, interstitials, and overlays.
- Automation: Templater is capable of automating the addition of subtitles, closed captions, translations, and on-screen text, which can further speed up the production process. Projector is another Dataclay product that can be used to automate the rendering and distribution of customized videos. Projector works with After Effects and Templater to automate repetitive distribution tasks. Using Templater and Projector can free up creative teams to focus on other tasks.
- Scalability: With the use of Templater, a single project file can be prepared for dynamic content, mapped with data from a data source, previewed, replicated, and rendered. Templater enables the generation of videos for large inventories, freeing up the team for other tasks. Templater is suitable for both individual content creators and large video production businesses.
- Flexibility: Templater can be used to integrate social media content into videos. Placeholders can be linked to live social media feeds so videos automatically update with the latest content. Templater‘s flexibility allows users to create customized videos for various purposes, including e-commerce, digital signage, and live events.
By using Templater and other Dataclay products, the NATAS creative team can streamline their video production process, reduce manual labor, and ensure consistent branding across all of their platforms. These tools allow the team to focus on creative aspects of video production rather than the tedious, repetitive tasks of manually updating graphics.
About NATAS
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) is a non-profit service organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of television and the promotion of creative leadership for artistic, educational, and technical achievements within the television industry. It recognizes excellence in television with the coveted Emmy Awards for News & Documentary, Sports, and Daytime television programming, as well as achievements in television Technology & Engineering.
“The Emmy Awards are stronger than ever, with new distribution platforms driving record-breaking entry levels in each of our competitions.”
Adam Sharp, NATAS President & CEO
NATAS membership consists of nearly 18,000 broadcast and media professionals in 19 regional chapters across the country. Beyond awards, NATAS has extensive educational programs including regional student television and National Student Production Awards for outstanding journalistic work by high school students, as well as scholarships, publications, and major activities for both industry professionals and the viewing public.
