A product catalog and a stack of property listings have the same shape. Each row describes one thing, and each thing deserves its own short video. The way to make those videos in After Effects is to design one template, put the row data in a data source, and let Templater build a version of the template for every row.
We make Templater, so we have opinions about how this goes right and how it goes wrong. This article walks through the setup for a catalog or a listing feed, shows a made-up but realistic week of work, and says plainly where the approach is a poor fit. We have kept every claim to what our own pages and posts say. Where we are describing a scenario instead of a feature, we say so.
One row, one video: how the pieces fit together
Start with the part that is not data. You build a single composition in After Effects that looks the way a finished product video should look. It has a title, a price line, a photo area, a short clip area, a logo, a color bar, maybe a closing card. Then you rig it. Rigging means you tell Templater which layers are dynamic and which column in your data should drive each one.
Templater customizes text, images, branding, graphic elements, colors and embedded footage. You can customize one layer or every layer in the composition. That range matters for catalogs, because a product video rarely changes only its title. The name changes, the photo changes, the accent color might change by category, and the clip behind it changes too.
The data source is the catalog
Templater has built-in connections to Google Sheets, to tab-separated files and to JSON files or feeds. It can also read a plain text file that holds a JSON object array exported from your own app. For a store, that last option is the interesting one, because most storefronts and listing systems can produce JSON. Whatever your system exports becomes the thing the template reads.
Two limits come up early, and we would rather you hear them now. Templater cannot read an Excel file directly. You export the Excel data to a tab-delimited file first. And Templater maps data to a single worksheet, and more generally to a single data source. If your product facts live on one tab and your photo links live on another, merge them into one sheet before you start. Doing that on day one saves a confusing afternoon later.
If you want a deeper comparison of the options, our post on five data sources you can use with Templater covers them. For a large or growing catalog, there is also QUE, our cloud data tool. QUE is JSON-based and has an API, so a web or mobile app can send data into it. Each item of data is a job, and a collection of jobs is a campaign. It also connects through Zapier to more than 5,000 apps, which is useful when your catalog changes inside another tool and you do not want to copy it by hand. You do not need to know JSON to use it. You enter information in the QUE Dash and QUE handles the rest.
Text, language and the one-style limit
Catalog data is messy, and text is where the mess shows. Templater reads your text as it appears in the spreadsheet, so commas, quotes, apostrophes and line breaks all come through. Characters from any language work, as long as the fonts you have installed contain the glyphs. Right-to-left scripts are supported. If you sell in several countries, that means the same template can carry product names in more than one language.
There is one text limit worth knowing about. A single text layer must use one font, one size, one weight and one style. You cannot mark up one layer so that half the words are bold and half are italic. The partial workaround is to place two text layers next to each other and give each its own look, then use the layer attachment properties to keep them together. For a product video, that usually means the brand name sits on one layer and the product name on another. Plan for it in the design and it costs you nothing.
Layout rules keep long names from breaking the design
Real catalogs have a product called “Mug” and another called “Hand-Thrown Stoneware Pour-Over Coffee Set With Wooden Stand.” The same template has to handle both. Templater has spatial layout rules for this. When it updates a composition with your data, it adjusts dynamic layers relative to their containing composition and to the layers around them. You do not align, scale and position each layer by hand for each row. The rules do that work. Our post on layout rules goes into the details.
A catalog week, start to finish
Here is a scenario. It is invented, and it has no numbers on purpose, because we do not want you to read a made-up result as a benchmark. A small homewares shop adds new products every month and wants a short video for each one to use on its product pages and in social posts. Next door, a small brokerage wants the same kind of video for each of its property listings. Both have a spreadsheet. Both have photos. Both have an intern who is tired of exporting by hand.
We will follow the shop first, then show what changes for the brokerage.
Monday: the template and the sheet
The shop’s designer builds one vertical composition. A photo fills the top two thirds. Under it sit a product name, a short line of description, a price line and a logo. The designer rigs each of those layers in Templater, and the price line is a text layer like any other. The shop formats the price as text in the sheet, exactly as it should appear on screen, so the template never has to do arithmetic or guess at currency symbols.
The sheet has one row per product. The columns include the product name, the description line, the price text, a category, a link to the main photo, a link to a short lifestyle clip and the file name the finished video should have. That last column matters, and we will come back to it.
Before anything renders, the designer uses Templater’s preview. A click shows how the data-driven composition will look before rendering or replicating. You can step through your jobs and watch how the template treats short text, long text, dark photos and bright ones. This is where you find the product whose name is forty characters long. It is much cheaper to find it in a preview than in a finished render.
Tuesday: footage that lives somewhere else
The shop’s photos and clips are stored in the cloud, not on the machine that runs After Effects. This is the part people expect to be hard, and it is the part we changed on purpose. Templater can use footage from local or cloud-based locations. You give it a URL for each remote asset in your data source. When Templater finds the URL, it creates a folder named [TEMPLATER DOWNLOADS] inside your footage source directory and downloads the file there, ready to use in the project.
Our post on tapping remote footage with smart URL processing explains how this works in Templater 3.3.1 and later. It handles two kinds of links. A direct download link names the file and its extension. A generic share link does not, so Templater first saves the file under a random hash as the name. After the download, it checks the MIME type, which is the standard identifier for a file type on the internet. It confirms that After Effects can use that type. If it can, Templater adds the right file extension and the file is ready.
The post also tells you what happens when something goes wrong. If the MIME type is not supported, or if the downloaded file is not the file you wanted, Templater logs a detailed error. The example in the post is a Google Drive link that returned an HTML page because of virus scanning on a large file. The advice from the post is to use direct download links for large files and for Google Drive in particular, to check that your remote assets are file types After Effects supports, and to look in the [TEMPLATER DOWNLOADS] folder from time to time, because it grows.
That last tip is practical for a catalog. Every product adds files. A folder that collects a new photo and a new clip per row will get big, and nobody empties it for you. Someone on the team should own it.
One honest caveat about our own source. That post talks about footage. The Templater page separately lists images as something you can customize. For still photos on a remote link, run a few test rows before you trust a whole catalog to it. Two rows will tell you more than any amount of reading.
Wednesday: clips that are not the same length
The lifestyle clips are not the same length. One is a few seconds of steam rising from a cup. Another is a longer pan across a kitchen. If the template were built around a fixed clip length, you would have to trim each clip by hand, which defeats the point of the whole exercise.
This is the problem Time Sculpting solves. It is a patented Templater feature, and it uses time-based rules to crop, trim, shift and stretch layers. The design stays intact while the footage that goes into it varies in length. A clip that runs long gets handled by the rules and a clip that runs short gets handled by the rules. Our post on time sculpting shows the techniques in more depth.
Time Sculpting has a cost, and it is design time. You have to decide, before you build, what should happen when a clip is too short for the title card or too long for the slot. Those decisions are creative ones, and software cannot make them for you. What the feature does is let you make each decision once instead of a few hundred times.
Thursday: categories that need different looks
Now the shop adds a second product family, say kitchen textiles, and the designer wants a calmer layout for those. Templater can switch project files on a per-row basis from the same data source. If you have two or more template projects that use the same data, one column in the sheet can say which project each row should use. The kitchenware rows use one template. The textile rows use another. Nobody splits the spreadsheet into two files.
The brokerage uses the same idea differently. Its listings come in a few kinds, and each kind needs its own composition. A condo listing leads with the building and the view. A house listing leads with the lot and the street. The listing sheet carries a template column, and the brokerage keeps one rigged project per kind. The facts that go on screen are the address line, the headline details the brokerage chooses to show, the agent’s name and contact line, and a photo or clip of the property. The brokerage writes those fields itself, in its own words, and checks them against its own standards before anything goes live. Templater puts text on screen. It does not review the text for you, and any rules about how listings may be described are still yours to follow.
Friday: spot checks before the big run
Before the batch, you want proof that the template behaves across the whole sheet, not only the three rows you looked at. Templater has a feature for this called spot checks. It creates still images or short movie clips of chosen frames from the data-merged compositions, so you can scan the results quickly. You mark the frames you care about with named timeline markers. If you do not, Templater samples an evenly spaced set of frames across the composition. You pick the file format of the outputs. Spot checks need Templater 3.0 or newer, and they are available in Pro and Bot, not in Rig. Our post on spot checks for quality assurance explains the setup.
For a catalog, a good habit is to put a marker on the frame where the price and the product name are both fully visible, and another on the closing card. Then flip through the stills. A wrapped name, a missing photo and an empty price line are all obvious in a contact sheet of stills. They are hard to see after you have watched the fortieth video.
Rendering the batch, delivering it, and where it breaks
With the template rigged, the data clean and the spot checks reviewed, the run itself is the easy part. Which edition you need depends on how much of the run you want to automate, and Dataclay describes the three this way. Rig is for an artist setting up a project. Pro processes batches of jobs. Bot lets you fully automate the workflow. Different people on your team may need different editions, so the designer who builds the template might use Rig while the person who runs the batch uses Pro. The buttons for rendering and replicating are only in Pro, and the Enable Bot button is only in Bot. On pricing, see our licensing page, since we do not quote prices in articles. Templater also has a 30-day free trial, and the trial includes the full Bot feature set, so you can test the entire pipeline on your own catalog before you decide. For more on batching, our post on batch rendering in After Effects covers the general ideas.
Naming, because someone has to find the files
When there are hundreds of finished videos, a name like “Comp 1_final_v2” is useless. Templater lets you set a custom output file name for each render job from inside your data source. That is why the sheet in our scenario has a column for it. The shop fills it with a name built from the product code, so the finished file for each product can be matched back to its row without opening it. The brokerage does the same with a listing identifier. Treat the naming column as part of the design of the system and not as an afterthought. It decides whether the next step, uploading and attaching videos to pages, is a script or an afternoon of dragging files around.
Pro for a run, Bot for a feed
If the catalog changes now and then and a person starts each batch, Pro is enough. You point Templater at the data source, review the previews, and render or replicate the rows. Replicating takes your project, inserts the data for each row, and saves a copy of the project. You can then send the replicas to the After Effects render queue or to Adobe Media Encoder, which is useful when you need an output format that After Effects does not offer natively.
If new rows arrive constantly, as they do when a listing system pushes new properties all day, a person starting each batch becomes the bottleneck. This is what Bot is for. Bot runs After Effects for you in the background. It checks periodically for new data, and when it finds some, it starts the customization and rendering. It also has a command line interface, so developers can push data in from their own systems. Dataclay’s FAQ points out one detail that trips up new users. Bot reads a render-status column in the data source to decide whether a row should be rendered, and if that column is missing you will get an error from the Google Sheets integration. Add the column before you switch Bot on, and keep an eye on the reserved column names so you do not use one for your own data by accident.
How long will it take?
We will not give you a number, because the honest answer depends on your template. Render time depends on the length of the videos, the resolution, your hardware, how much of each video is dynamic versus static, how heavy the effects are, and how you built the template. The FAQ recommends a pre-flight. Render one video, or a small batch, on a machine similar to your production one, using a row similar to the rest. Then multiply the time for one video by the number of videos. If you render in a queue, that is your estimate. If you run Bot on several machines in parallel, the work divides, so two machines cut the total time in half and three cut it to a third.
The other lever is the template itself. Our post on speeding up After Effects exports makes a few points that matter most for catalogs. Templater evaluates every layer in a project, so delete unused layers, effects and compositions. Precompose and crop layers that are scaled way down, so After Effects processes fewer pixels. Use proxies for heavy footage while you work. A product video that renders in a fraction of the time per row saves hours across a large catalog. You can read that post as speed up After Effects exports.
After the render: Projector and delivery
Rendering is half the job. The videos still have to get to the product pages, the video host and the archive. Projector is our app for rendering and distribution. It can render several customized videos at once, in parallel, based on the number of cores in your machine. If your machine has eight cores, Projector renders eight videos at once. It can also transcode as part of each render, which gives you more format choices than After Effects offers natively. It can make supporting assets such as GIF clips and poster images, which suits product pages and email, and it can archive to secure storage.
For delivery, Projector lists integrations with Vimeo, JW Player and Frame.io for streaming, AWS S3 for storage, and QUE and Google Sheets for data. It also retrieves metadata from the streaming platform and writes it back to your data source. For a catalog, the practical version is this. Each row of the sheet ends up with the address of its finished video, so your product page or your listing page can point to it. Projector runs as a local desktop application, and your assets are not visible to anyone else, including us.
Where this approach is a poor fit
Be honest with yourself about three situations. First, if you need five videos, make them by hand. A rigged template pays for itself over many rows, and the setup time is real. Second, if every product needs its own story, its own pacing and its own camera moves, a template will feel generic, because it is one design repeated. Data-driven video is strongest when the structure is shared and the content varies. Third, Templater needs Adobe After Effects. If your team does not use it and does not want to, this is the wrong tool.
Cloud rendering has one more wrinkle. Templater can run on Windows Server machines in a cloud environment, and Dataclay requires no special license for that. But Templater needs After Effects installed and running there, and Adobe’s license terms are its own business, so check them first.
The honest bottom line
If your catalog or your listings live in rows, a video per row is a data problem more than a design problem. Build one template well, rig it, clean the sheet, give every row a file name, and run spot checks before the batch. Start with a few rows, find the awkward ones, and only then scale up. If you need the work done by a person for each item, or you only have a handful of items, do it by hand. For everyone with a real catalog, the 30-day trial of Templater is the cheapest way to find out whether it fits yours.
We covered a lot of ground up there, so here are the questions we hear most often from people who are about to build their first catalog or listing batch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Templater read my Excel product list directly?
No. Templater cannot read an Excel file directly. You export the data to a tab-delimited file first, or you move it into a Google Sheet. It also works with JSON files and feeds, so if your store system can export JSON, that is another route. Whichever you pick, Templater maps data to a single worksheet and a single data source, so merge your product facts and your photo links into one sheet before you start.
Can my product photos and clips stay in cloud storage?
Yes for footage. You put a URL for each remote asset in the data source, and Templater downloads it into a [TEMPLATER DOWNLOADS] folder inside your footage source directory. Smart URL processing works in Templater 3.3.1 and later, and it checks the file type after download. Use direct download links for large files and for Google Drive. Our post on the feature talks about footage, so test a few rows with still photos before you commit a whole catalog.
What happens if a link in my sheet is broken?
If the file that comes back is not a type After Effects supports, or is not the file you wanted, Templater logs a detailed error so you can find and fix the row. The example in our post is a Google Drive link that returned an HTML page because of virus scanning on a large file. A direct download link avoids that case. Use Templater’s preview and spot checks to catch problem rows before you start a long render.
How do I use different templates for different product types or listing types?
Templater can switch project files on a per-row basis within a single data source. Add a column that names the template each row should use, and keep one rigged project per product family or listing type. That way kitchenware, textiles, condos and houses can each have their own composition without splitting your spreadsheet into several files.
How do I name hundreds of finished videos so I can find them?
Set a custom output file name for each render job from inside your data source. Many teams build the name from a product code or listing identifier, so each finished video matches its row. Decide the naming pattern before the first batch, because it controls how easily you can upload the files or attach them to pages afterward.
Which edition of Templater do I need for a catalog?
Rig is for an artist setting up a project. Pro lets you process batches of jobs. Bot lets you fully automate the workflow, so it can watch a data source for new rows and render them without anyone starting the batch. A designer may use Rig while the person who runs batches uses Pro. For prices, see our pricing page. The 30-day free trial includes the full Bot feature set.
How long will a batch of product videos take to render?
It depends on video length, resolution, your hardware, how much of each video is dynamic, how heavy the effects are, and how the template is built. Render one representative video on a machine like your production machine, then multiply by the number of videos for a queue estimate. Running Bot on several machines in parallel divides the work, so two machines cut the time in half. Projector can also render several videos at once, based on your core count.
Can the finished videos be sent to Vimeo or storage automatically?
Yes, through Projector. It lists integrations with Vimeo, JW Player, Frame.io and AWS S3, and it can write metadata from the streaming platform back to your data source. You can also write your own upload script and hook it into Templater’s events. Our GitHub repository includes sample scripts for Windows, Mac and Node.js.
