To automate After Effects rendering from the command line, you need Templater Bot. Bot watches your data for new rows, or takes data you push in from a shell command, and then customizes and renders each video without anyone sitting at the machine.
That is the short version. The longer version is about who actually needs it, because Bot is the most capable edition of Templater and also the one most people do not need. This article explains what Bot does, how it differs from Rig and Pro, what you have to set up around it, and the plain cases where Pro is enough and you should save yourself the trouble.
What Bot does that a person at the keyboard does not
Templater comes in three editions. Rig is for an artist who sets up a project. Pro is for processing batches of jobs. Bot is for fully automating the workflow. Each edition includes the one before it, so Bot ships with everything in Rig and Pro and adds the part that removes the human.
Here is how we describe Bot on our own pages. It lets you build automated video systems. It can check periodically for incoming data and use that data to kick off new, unique renders. Or you can use the command line to push data in and create new renders. Those are the two doors into the same room. In one, Bot goes looking. In the other, something else hands it work.
The first door is the one people picture when they hear “automation.” You have a data source, such as a Google Sheet. New rows land in it. Bot sees them and starts working. Nobody opens After Effects, nobody clicks Render, and nobody has to remember that the sheet changed. Bot operates After Effects for you. When it finds new data, it triggers Templater’s customization and rendering process.
The second door suits developers. The command line interface lets you engage with Templater processes through shell commands, so you can fold video versioning into a pipeline or system you already run. Most of the controls you find in the Templater panel can be set through a command line options file. If your team already thinks in scripts, cron-style jobs and deployment tooling, this is the natural way in. A render becomes one more step that something else can call.
We call this running as a background process, and the phrase matters. A background process does not need you to watch it. You start it, you point it at the data, and you go do something else. It is the difference between cooking a meal and setting a table for a restaurant that never closes.
The Bot is only part of the job
One piece of honesty belongs here. Templater Bot does not come with a front end, a web app or a mobile app. We designed it to be flexible, so we provide documentation that lets developers build whatever interface they need with Templater as the back end. If you have the people to build a form or an app, that flexibility is the point. If you do not, Dataclay can help build it. Either way, plan for that piece. Bot renders the video. It does not give your customers a page to ask for one.
Developers can create web or mobile apps that feed data into Templater’s data source. That is the collaborative, custom video content setup we describe on our Templater page, and it is how a viewer’s input ends up as a finished video. The input goes into the data source, Bot sees it, and the render follows. If you would rather not wire that up from scratch, the QUE API offers engineers and coders an easy way to integrate the automation of the Templater Bot into their own apps. We wrote about that in our piece on QUE’s API as a video API for automated video creation.
Who needs it, and who does not
Our own list of when Bot is the right fit is short. You need to create videos on demand without human intervention. You need command line control to re-version After Effects projects. Or you want to develop web or mobile apps that create dynamic videos from user input. Read those three again and notice what they share. In every one, a person is not the trigger.
That is the test. Ask who or what starts each render. If the answer is “me, when I am ready,” you are describing Pro. If the answer is “whatever data arrives, whenever it arrives,” you are describing Bot.
Unattended work
Unattended means no one is there when the render begins. A data row arrives at an hour when your team is asleep, or a form submission comes in while the person who built the template is on vacation. With Pro, that row waits until someone sits down and starts the batch. With Bot, it gets rendered.
This matters most when speed to the viewer is the whole value of the video. A personalized video that arrives the same hour someone asked for it is a different thing from one that arrives next Tuesday. Bot is how you close that gap without hiring someone to sit and click.
Large data sets
Our Templater page says to use Bot to automatically replicate or render data sets of a significant size. Our FAQ goes further and answers the question of whether you can really create hundreds of thousands of videos. The answer there is yes, and there are two ways to do it, in a queue or in parallel.
In a queue, Templater breaks a massive workload into manageable batches and queues up jobs one after another, so it does not overload your system’s ability to render. In parallel, you run several machines with Templater Bot at once. That divides the workload across devices and produces more videos per hour. Two machines cut the total production time in half, three cut it to a third, and so on.
Parallel Bots need one thing set up properly, and that is the data source. We have documentation on setting up a data source for multiple Bots. Read it before you add a second machine, because several machines reading one list need a clear way to avoid doing the same row twice.
Servers
Servers are where unattended work usually lives, and here we have to be careful about what we say. You can run Templater on one or more Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services. That lets you scale your production capacity beyond what your desktop hardware can do. Dataclay does not require a special license for this.
The catch is Adobe. Templater requires After Effects to be installed and running in the cloud environment, and Adobe’s standard End User License Agreement does not permit After Effects to be installed on a server. You have to contact Adobe for the appropriate license, and you will need to talk to an Adobe salesperson to get it. We are saying this plainly because it is the part that surprises people. Our software is not the obstacle. The After Effects license is the thing to settle first.
If your reason for wanting a server is control over where your assets go, our piece on the case for on-prem video automation covers that side of the decision.
Bot, Pro and Rig, side by side in plain words
The edition question is easier once you describe each one by the person who uses it.
Rig is the artist’s edition. It gives you the tools to prepare an After Effects project for dynamic content. You map your data to composition layers and preview how those layers change as the data is processed. We say Rig is perfect when swapping content in your project takes too much of your time, when you need to prepare a project for a different machine running Pro or Bot, or when you want to make a Templater-compatible project to sell or distribute as a template. Rig is a one-time purchase, and it also lets team members preview data and test rigged templates without extra Pro or Bot licenses. It does not render batches. That is a real limit, and it surprises people who start on the free trial.
Pro is the batch edition. It does everything Rig does and adds the functions that batch render or batch replicate re-versioned master compositions from your data source. We say Pro is perfect when a client has a database of customer information and needs a quick turnaround on many unique videos, when a studio has several artists working at once on different variations of a master composition, or when you bought a Templater-compatible project and want many versions of it. In all of those, someone presses go. Pro does the hard multiplication. A person still picks the moment.
Bot is the unattended edition. It does everything Pro does and takes the person out of the loop. It checks for data, takes pushed data from the command line, and runs as a background process.
There is a small trap built into those differences, and our FAQ names it. The Render and Replicate buttons work only in Pro. Enable Bot works only in Bot. None of them work in Rig. The free 30-day trial includes every feature, including the ones exclusive to Bot, so someone who tries Bot, buys Rig and then finds three grayed-out buttons has not found a bug. They bought a different edition than the one they tested. If you need those functions, you can upgrade your license.
The trial is a fully featured version of Templater Bot, which makes it the right way to answer the question for yourself. And if you buy and find Templater does not work for you, our refund window is 30 days. For anything about price, see our Templater licensing guide and our licensing page. We keep amounts off articles like this one so they cannot go stale.
A picture of the difference
Imagine an events company that sends each registered attendee a short welcome video with their name, their session and their company logo. It is a made-up example, but the shape is real.
In version one, registration closes on a Friday. On Monday a producer opens the rigged project, points Templater Pro at the exported attendee list, previews a few rows, fixes a name that is too long for its text layer, and starts the batch. Pro renders every row. The producer checks a few outputs and sends them. This works well. The list is fixed, the deadline is known, and one person is present for the whole thing.
In version two, the company opens registration for months and wants each attendee to get a video minutes after signing up. Nobody is going to start a batch for every new sign-up. A developer connects the registration form so that each sign-up adds a row to the data source. Bot sees the new row, customizes the project and renders it. A small script registered to a Templater event can then send the file along. The producer never touches it again, except to look at the log if something goes wrong.
Same template. Same design. The only thing that changed was what starts the render. Version one is Pro. Version two is Bot.
Setting up Bot without losing a week to it
Bot is not hard, but it is picky in a few specific places, and each is documented. Here are the ones we see most.
Start from the launcher script. To get going with Bot’s command line interface, you download a launcher script and follow the instructions on the GitHub page we point to. We also publish documentation on getting started with the command line interface, running Templater from the command line, and troubleshooting it. We will not reproduce option names here, because the documentation is the source of truth and it changes with versions. Read the current version before you script anything.
Mind the foreground. One error we hear about is “Unable to find a Window Constructor.” It appears when you use Bot’s command line interface to monitor a data source and After Effects is not running in the foreground. The fix is to add a -ui argument when you launch Bot. This is a good example of why unattended does not mean unseen. The machine still has to be set up so After Effects can run properly while no one is at it.
Give Bot the columns it reads. Bot reads a render-status column in your data source to decide whether it should render a given data set. If you set a Bot Name in Templater’s Preferences, the data source also needs a column with the header bot. When either is missing, you can see an error that mentions code 3 and a ScriptError from Google. It looks alarming and it means only that a value Bot needs could not be found. Our documentation lists the reserved column names, so check that list before you name your own columns.
One data source, not several. Templater can pull from a single data source at a time, whether that is a Google Sheet, a JSON file or a tab-delimited file. It cannot connect to more than one worksheet inside a Google Sheet. If your data starts in Excel, export it to a tab-delimited file first, because Templater does not read Excel directly. For a walk through the spreadsheet route, see how to automate video editing with Google Sheets.
Plan for what happens after the render. Rendering is rarely the end. Templater event scripts let you run shell scripts or use the Templater API to write ExtendScripts that listen for events Templater broadcasts. Scripts can upload a finished video to a streaming provider and write the video’s URL back to the data source, which lets email marketers embed the right link in each message. They can also send you an email or an SMS when an upload succeeds. Our GitHub repository has sample scripts and documentation for Windows, Mac and Node.js. If you need help writing them, Dataclay can help.
Check before you trust. A process nobody watches needs a way to be checked after the fact. Spot checks are stills or short clips of chosen frames from data-merged compositions, and they are available in Pro and Bot. You choose frames with named timeline markers, or Templater samples frames at even intervals. Our spot check article has a section on exporting spot checks through the command line, which is how you fold that check into an unattended run. Read generate spot checks with Templater before you launch a long job. And keep Templater’s log files in mind, since you can inspect them for full transparency about what it did.
For machines you cannot sit in front of, some licensing details help. A Standard License is activated on one machine at a time. A Floating License can serve any number of devices on a network connected to a licensing server, though only one system uses it at a time. You can manage a license remotely from your Dataclay account without access to the machine it is installed on. Offline activation exists for a system with restricted or no internet access. One more point: the QUE Meter model needs the computer to stay connected to the internet so it can track credit use, while traditional Pro and Bot subscriptions do not need that constant connection.
If you want to watch the work while it happens, QUE Dash includes a dashboard where you can see each job’s status and the utilization rates of rendering machines. We describe it as a way to monitor all the customized compositing happening while you do other things.
When Pro is enough
Now the part where we talk you out of the bigger edition. Most people reading an article like this are one step ahead of what they need. They hear “automated” and assume it is the grown-up version. It is not. It is a different tool for a different trigger.
Pro is enough when a person is going to be there anyway. A designer who builds the template, loads the data, previews the rows and starts the batch is already doing the supervision that Bot exists to replace. If a human is checking the output before it goes out, an automated trigger only gives you a faster path to a mistake you would have caught by looking.
Pro is enough when your batches have a known size and a known date. A list of attendees, a catalog, a set of localized versions, a season’s worth of player cards. You know the number of rows, you know when they are due, and the work happens in one sitting or a few. A scheduled, human-started batch is simpler to reason about than a watcher that runs on its own.
Pro is enough when you do not have a developer. Much of what makes Bot worth it comes from connecting it to something: a form, an app, a pipeline. Without someone to build that connection, Bot is a capable engine with nothing feeding it. The command line interface is built for developers, and our documentation assumes you are comfortable with shell commands and scripts.
Pro is enough when you are not sure yet. Start there, learn what your data really looks like, and move up when you notice that someone is spending their day starting renders. Upgrading is something we support, and the licensing pages show how. Our batch rendering explainer, what is batch rendering in After Effects, covers the Pro side of the ladder in more depth, and how to make hundreds of personalized videos from data shows a full run from one template.
Bot is the answer when the opposite is true. People are the bottleneck. Data arrives on its own schedule. The volume is high enough that a queue or several machines matter. Something other than a human needs to call for a video. If you recognize your situation in that list, stop trying to stretch Pro over it.
If speed is the real complaint
Sometimes the person asking about the command line actually wants renders to finish sooner. Automation does not make a single render faster. It removes waiting between renders and keeps the machine busy. To estimate how long a batch will take, render one video that resembles the rest on a machine like your production machine, then multiply by the number of videos. Time depends on video length, output resolution, your hardware, the ratio of dynamic to static frames, how processor-intensive your effects are, and how the template is built. Running Bot on several machines divides the total.
If you want more than one video rendering at a time on a single computer, that is a job for Projector, which renders in parallel based on the number of cores in your machine. It runs as a local desktop application, so your videos render on your machine. Template construction matters too, and our tips on speeding up After Effects exports start with removing unused assets and pre-composing and cropping oversized layers. For output codecs After Effects does not offer, Templater’s Replicate function saves a copy of the project with your data inserted so that Adobe Media Encoder can process it.
The bottom line
Bot is for the day you stop being the trigger. It checks your data or accepts it from the command line, runs as a background process, and handles data sets of a significant size, either in a queue or across several machines. It needs a developer to connect it, a machine set up so After Effects can run, and a valid After Effects license wherever it lives, which on a cloud server means a conversation with Adobe.
Pro is for the person who starts the batch, and for most teams it is the right first stop. Rig is for the artist who builds and previews the template, and for teammates who need to see it. If you cannot decide, use the 30-day trial, which gives you the full Bot, and see whether you ever miss the human in the loop. You can read more in the Dataclay learning hub.
We covered a lot above, and edition questions tend to come in a predictable order. These are the ones we hear most before someone buys.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Templater edition do I need to render from the command line?
You need Templater Bot. Bot ships with the Rig and Pro functionality and adds command line interface control, which engages Templater processes through shell commands. Most controls found in the Templater panel can be set through a command line options file. Pro lets a person batch render or replicate from the panel, and Rig prepares and previews projects. Neither of those is built for scripted, unattended control.
How does Bot know when there is new data to render?
Bot checks your data source periodically for incoming data, and when it finds new data it triggers Templater’s customization and rendering process. It reads a render-status column to decide whether to render a given data set. If you set a Bot Name in Preferences, the data source also needs a column with the header bot. Our documentation lists the reserved column names, so check it before naming columns.
Can I push data in from a script instead of waiting for Bot to find it?
Yes. Besides checking for incoming data, Bot lets you use the command line to push data in and create new renders. This suits developers who want to call a render from a pipeline or an app. To start, download the launcher script and follow the instructions on the GitHub page we point to in our FAQ, and then read the documentation on running Templater from the command line.
Why do I get “Unable to find a Window Constructor” when I use the command line?
This error appears when you use Bot’s command line interface to monitor a data source and After Effects is not running in the foreground. The fix is to add a -ui argument when you launch Bot. Our documentation on troubleshooting the Templater command line interface covers related problems, so check it if the error persists after you make that change.
Can I run Bot on a cloud server?
Yes. You can run Templater on one or more Windows Server machines in a cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services, and Dataclay requires no special license for this. Templater needs After Effects installed and running in that environment, though. Adobe’s standard End User License Agreement does not permit After Effects on a server, so you must speak with an Adobe salesperson to obtain the appropriate license.
Is Pro enough if I only render a few batches a month?
Usually, yes. Pro batch renders or batch replicates re-versioned master compositions from your data source, and a person starts each run. If you have a known list, a known deadline and someone available to start and check the batch, Pro covers it. Move to Bot when people become the bottleneck, when data arrives on its own schedule, or when an app or pipeline needs to request videos without a person involved.
Does Bot come with a web form or app for my customers?
No. Templater does not come with a front-end, web or mobile application out of the box. We designed Bot to be flexible and provide documentation so developers can build whatever interface they need with Templater as the back end. If you lack the staff or skills to build one, Dataclay can help. The QUE API is another route for connecting your own app to Bot’s automation.
Can I try Bot before I buy?
Yes. Our 30-day free trial is a fully featured version of Templater Bot. If you buy a license afterward and decide Templater does not work for you, contact us for a refund within 30 days. One caution: if you activate Rig after the trial, the Render, Replicate and Enable Bot buttons will be disabled, because those functions belong to Pro and Bot. You can upgrade your license if you need them.
