Templater lives inside After Effects, so setting it up means three things in order: install it and confirm it landed, tag the layers you want data to change, and point the panel at a data source. Everything after that, previewing a row, checking a batch, rendering, is the same loop repeated with more rows.
We build and support Templater, and our documentation points to a few steps that are easy to skip. A layer that was never renamed. A footage path that is not relative to the footage folder. A preview menu left on “current state”. This walkthrough follows the order we would use ourselves, and it flags the spots where a project quietly does nothing instead of throwing an error. It is based on our own documentation, so where the documentation is silent on a detail, we say so instead of guessing.
Install Templater and confirm it is really there
Templater works with Adobe After Effects on Windows or macOS. Our system requirements list Windows 7 or newer and macOS from 10.15 High Sierra through 15.x Sequoia, on Intel or Apple Silicon, with After Effects CS5 and later. We say plainly that we do our best to keep legacy After Effects versions working, but we cannot guarantee every combination of operating system and host version. An internet connection is needed for activating some features, validating edition features, using cloud-based footage, connecting to Que, and reading Google Sheets documents.
If you bought Templater through aescripts and aeplugins, you can install it with their manager app. The default install there is the standard node-locked build for modern After Effects. The steps for After Effects 2022 and newer go like this. Make sure your operating system account has administrator privileges. Quit After Effects. Open the manager app, sign in, pick Templater from the product list and click Install. Then follow the installation wizard.
Do not rely on the wizard’s finish screen alone. Open After Effects and check three places:
- In Preferences, under Scripting and Expressions, confirm that “Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network” is switched on.
- In the Effect menu, look under Dataclay for the Templater Settings effect. If it is there, the native plugin installed correctly.
- In the Window menu, look for a Templater item ending in .jsxbin. If it is there, the panel installed correctly.
One trap sits between those checks and the next section. If you use After Effects 2021 or earlier, the default installer is the wrong one. The manager app offers a separate download called “Templater for AE 2021 and earlier”, and its installers carry LEGACY_MFG_AES in the file name. Our FAQ makes a similar point for anyone who sees the installer fail: use the most current installer, and use the Legacy installer for older After Effects. The FAQ words the cutoff as 2020 or earlier, while the install page says 2021 and earlier, so check the download page for your version. If you want the floating license build instead, which is built for machines that share seats from a license server, it has its own install route. Our Templater licensing guide explains how to choose between the two.
Register, activate, and know what trial mode does
The first time you open the Templater panel on a machine, a registration dialog appears. It asks for your full name and email address. Company name is optional. Registration is once per machine, and it comes back if you reinstall your operating system or run Templater from a newly created user account.
After you register, Templater runs in trial mode. The documentation describes it as fully featured with minor limitations, and it lasts thirty days from installation. Two limits matter while you are learning. The Templater Settings effect puts a graphical watermark on rendered layers, and replicating target compositions only works when the “Send Replicates to the Adobe Media Encoder” preference is enabled. When the thirty days end, the features stop working until you activate a license.
To activate a standard license while you are online, open the Templater panel, click Preferences, go to the Licensing tab and click Activation in the Online Management group. Enter your product key, click Activate License, and check License Info to confirm it worked. Then save your project, quit After Effects and relaunch it. If the trial watermark still shows after the restart, purge After Effects memory from the Edit menu, using Purge, All Memory and Disk Cache and then Purge, Image Cache Memory, and restart once more. Machines without internet use an offline route that exchanges an activation request file for a response file through your Dataclay account. That process, and deactivating a license so you can move it, are covered in the Templater help pages.
If you are not sure which edition to activate, here is the short version from our documentation. Rig prepares an After Effects project, maps data to layers and previews the result. Pro adds batch rendering and replicating. Bot adds the fully automated, background workflow. A perpetual Rig license can also be paired with the Que Meter, which tracks credits for outputs. The point for setup is that Rig is enough for everything in the next two sections. Producing files in bulk needs Pro or Bot, or Rig paired with Que Meter credits.
Rig the project: dynamic layers, names and a target
Rigging is the part that is yours alone, because Templater cannot guess which layers should change. A dynamic layer is one that updates when Templater processes a row of data. You mark a layer dynamic by applying the Templater Settings effect to it. As of Templater 2.8 the supported layer types are text, solid, footage, pre-composition, adjustment and JSON. Shape layers cannot take the effect. If a shape needs to change, pre-compose it and apply the effect to the pre-composition.
Next comes naming, which is where most silent failures start. Each dynamic layer needs a unique name that matches a column name or property key in your data source. A title layer might be called introTitle, and the data source then needs a column called introTitle. Two rules in our documentation deserve underlining. First, you must explicitly rename the layer even when the name After Effects gave it already matches the column. If you skip the rename, Templater may not treat the layer as dynamic. Second, avoid spaces in layer names. We also advise a name you will recognize later, because you will write the matching column by hand.
Apply the Templater Settings effect once per layer. Applying it twice produces unexpected results, and the documentation says so directly.
Now think about what happens when new data changes a layer’s size. A longer headline, a differently shaped logo and a taller photo all push against the design. Layout rules are the part of Templater that handles this, and you set them for each layer inside the Templater Settings effect. Scale Factor rescales a layer to a percentage of its parent composition’s dimensions, so a value of 100 percent makes the layer fill that composition. The alignment controls pin a layer to a side or corner of its composition. You can add pixel padding, ask the layer to initialize to the center first, or measure from the anchor point instead of the layer’s bounding box. To see how the layout engine reads your choices, set the “Preview uses” menu in the panel to “current state”. One limit to know in advance: layout rules do not work correctly on any layer property with “Separate Dimensions” enabled.
If your footage has different lengths from row to row, Templater also has Time Sculpting, a set of time-based rules for cropping, trimming, shifting and stretching layers. We keep that out of this walkthrough on purpose, because it needs a target composition and deserves its own page. For a first project, a text layer and a footage layer with no timing rules is the right size.
Finally, tell Templater which composition to process. A target composition can come from three places. Your data source can name one in a target column, which overrides everything else, but then you must set one of the other two methods as a backup, and we recommend “from project”. The Preferences dialog can hold one fixed target, which suits a single composition, though it errors if you open an AEP file that does not contain that name. Or you can set it in the project itself by wrapping the composition name in double braces or double brackets, which stores the choice in the project file. If two compositions in one project use that notation, you will get unexpected behavior. If no method yields a composition, Templater shows an error.
Connect data, then preview before you render anything
The Batch Assets section of the panel holds three paths: the data source, the footage folder and the output folder. (The native Google Sheets connection needs Templater 3.5 or later, and tab-separated and JSON text files must be saved as UTF-8.) A data source can be a Que campaign, a native Google Sheets document, a tab-separated file, a plain text file containing JSON, or a remote JSON feed. Each row of a spreadsheet, or each object in a JSON array, is one render job. Each column or property key is one dynamic element. Our overview of the five data sources compares them, and the Google Sheets reference goes deeper on the most common choice.
For footage, create one folder for the project, then make subfolders for audio, images and video. Type the folder path into the Footage folder field, or choose it with the button beside it. Here is the rule that trips people: any footage path inside your data must be relative to the footage folder, not an absolute path. The small link icons beside the Data, Footage and Destination fields open each location, which saves hunting through the file system.
Here is a scenario that uses only what is above. You have a lower-third template with a text layer named guestName and a text layer named guestTitle. You make a spreadsheet with a header row of guestName and guestTitle, then three rows of people. You rename the two layers, apply the Templater Settings effect to each, link the sheet, and set a target composition. Now you preview.
Previewing has two modes. In manual mode Templater reads your data source and updates every dynamic layer with the row you choose. You can set a range, step through consecutive rows with the transport controls, and click the Refresh icon to force a pull from the start row, the end row, or a row between. Templater re-reads the data source every time you preview and does not cache, so a small range keeps previews fast. In cycle mode you click the clock icon and Templater steps through the whole range on its own. It reads the data source only once before it starts cycling, so edits you make to the sheet mid-cycle will not show up.
If you click preview and nothing changes, check these four things before anything else, because our troubleshooting table lists them as the usual causes. The “Preview uses” menu may be set to “current state” instead of an option such as next row or previous row. The Templater Settings effect may not be applied to any supported layer. A layer name may not match a column name or property key exactly. If you use a Google Sheet, a column name may begin with a number, contain spaces, contain the _ character, or contain a dollar sign. All four produce a preview that looks like nothing happened.
Produce files, and decide how much to check first
On its own, Rig stops at preview, and the Render and Replicate buttons stay disabled. Pro adds them, and a perpetual Rig license paired with the Que Meter can also spot check, replicate and render, with one credit used per output. People who used the free trial first are sometimes surprised by this, since the trial includes every feature including Bot-only ones. When you activate Rig afterward, those buttons go gray. If you need them, you upgrade the license.
Before a batch render the documentation asks for a checklist, and it is worth treating as one. The Templater Settings effect must be on every layer meant to be dynamic. Column names or property keys must match layer names. The data source, footage folder and output folder must be filled in. A target composition must be specified. You choose a render settings template and an output module under Output Options, enter a valid data range under Transport, and give the batch a job prefix. The start row must be greater than 1 for Google Sheets and tab-delimited files, and greater than 0 for a JSON array. The end row must always be greater than the start row. Then click Render.
Templater installs two template files of render settings and output modules to get you started. You load them yourself, from the Templates items in the After Effects Edit menu, and then click Load Settings and Module Templates in the panel. They include draft and best-quality render settings, either for the whole target composition or only its work area, plus output modules such as ProRes 422 HQ, Animation, PNG sequences and lossless formats. The PNG sequence modules have a bonus that suits quality checks. Set the target composition’s work area to one frame, pick a PNG sequence module, and you get a still image for every row, which shows quickly how your data treated each video.
Spot checks do the same job more formally. In Pro and Bot, a spot check exports stills or short clips of chosen frames from data-merged compositions, so you can see how data lands across many jobs without rendering everything. You mark the frames with named composition timeline markers. Without markers, Templater samples frames spread evenly across the duration. Our spot checks article has the details.
Last, a note about where the files go. Output goes to the folder in the Output Folder field. If you replicate instead of render, auto-generated compositions are placed in a folder named [TEMPLATER COMPS] in the project panel, and you can send them to Adobe Media Encoder for the rendering work. For the whole picture of how a batch moves from data to files, our batch rendering guide is the next read.
What this walkthrough does not cover, and the bottom line
This is a map of the first project, not a manual. We did not walk through Dynamic Essential Properties, expressions, event scripts, the command line, remote footage on Google Drive or the Bot. Each has its own help page, and the complete Templater guide shows where they fit. Our documentation also does not give minimum disk or memory figures, so we do not offer any.
The bottom line is short. Check the install in three places. Register once, and activate before the thirty days run out. Rename every dynamic layer to match your data, apply the effect once, and set a target composition. Link your data, use relative footage paths, and preview a few rows before you press Render. If you want to try it without committing, the trial gives you thirty days and the whole sequence above. The Templater page shows the editions side by side.
That covers the first project from install to preview. Here are the questions people ask us most as they start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to leave After Effects to use Templater?
No. Templater installs as a panel and an effect inside After Effects. You open the Templater panel from the Window menu and apply the Templater Settings effect from Effect, then Dataclay. Previewing, rendering and replicating all happen from the panel. The Bot edition can also run After Effects as a background process, including from a command line, so you can version a project without operating the interface, but you still prepare the project inside After Effects first.
How do I know the install worked?
Open After Effects and check three places. In Preferences, under Scripting and Expressions, confirm that Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network is enabled. In the Effect menu, look under Dataclay for Templater Settings. In the Window menu, look for the Templater item ending in .jsxbin. If all three are present, the plugin and the panel are installed. If you use After Effects 2021 or earlier, make sure you used the legacy installer.
What can I do in the free trial?
Templater installs in trial mode, which is fully featured with minor limitations and lasts thirty days from installation. Rendered layers carry a graphical watermark from the Templater Settings effect, and replicating target compositions only works when the Send Replicates to the Adobe Media Encoder preference is enabled. At the end of the thirty days, the features stop working until you activate a license. Registration is required once per machine.
Why does nothing change when I click preview?
Check four things. The Preview uses menu may be on current state instead of next row or previous row. The Templater Settings effect may not be applied to a supported layer. A layer name may not match a column name or JSON property key exactly. With Google Sheets, a column name may begin with a number or contain spaces, the _ character or a dollar sign. These are the usual causes in our troubleshooting table.
Can I render a whole batch with Templater Rig?
No. Rig prepares an After Effects project, maps data to layers and previews the result. Render and Replicate come with Templater Pro, or with Rig paired with Que Meter credits, and the Bot edition adds the automated background workflow. The free trial includes features from every edition, so Render and Replicate work during the trial and go gray if you then activate a Rig license. You can upgrade the license if you need them.
Which data source should I start with?
Templater reads a Que campaign, a native Google Sheets document, a tab-separated file, a plain text JSON file or a remote JSON feed. Every edition supports all of them. For a first project, a small Google Sheet or a tab-separated file is the simplest, because each row is one render job and each column header is a layer name. Excel files are not read directly. You export them to a tab-delimited file first.
