Every job in Que carries a render status, and that one value tells you where the job is and whose move it is. Ready means the job has its data and is waiting to be picked up. Queued means it is in line for its satellite. Processing means Templater is rendering it right now. Done means it finished. Canceled means it stopped early, and an error code means something broke while it was being made.
Knowing the names is the easy part. The useful part is knowing what each state asks of you, because some of them mean “wait” and some of them mean “go look at a specific machine.” This page walks through the whole set, explains who writes each value, and tells you what to check when a job sits in one state longer than it should. If you have not created a job yet, start with our guide to getting started with the Que API and come back once something is in your campaign.
The states, in order, and who sets each one
Our CEO, Arie Stavchansky, describes render status as a job’s progress through the pipeline, and that is the right way to hold it in your head. It is one field on the job, it moves in one direction when things go well, and Templater is the one moving it. Here is the full list as he set it out for us.
ready: the job has all its data and is prepared for processing, but it has not been queued yet.queued: the job is waiting in line for the satellite machine it is assigned to.processing: Templater is actively versioning and rendering the job.done: the render completed successfully.canceled: the job stopped before it finished.- An error code, such as
ERR::MEDIAfor problems with assets orERR::AFXHOSTfor After Effects errors: the job failed during processing.
The most important thing to understand about that list is ownership. Only one value is yours to write. You, or the application that feeds Que, set a job to ready. Everything after that is written by Templater as it does the work. Our Bot documentation says this plainly about the render-status column in a spreadsheet, where you should only ever type ready or clear the cell, and we recommend treating Que jobs the same way. When you create a job through the API, Que gives it ready by default, so in most cases you never type the word at all.
That ownership rule has a practical consequence. If you find yourself setting a job to processing or done by hand, stop. Those values are Templater’s record of what actually happened on a machine. Writing them yourself does not render anything. It only hides the job from the pipeline and makes the record lie.
The order of events inside a satellite is worth knowing too, because it explains a pattern that worries people the first time they see it. When the Bot checks for work, it takes every item marked ready and moves all of them to queued at once. Then it works through them one at a time, setting each to processing, rendering it, and setting it to done or to an error code. So a campaign where forty jobs flip to queued together and then drain one by one is behaving exactly as designed. Nothing is stuck. The satellite simply claimed the batch before it started on the first job.
Two states sit outside the normal path. canceled means the job was stopped before it finished, so you should not expect a complete output from it. The error codes mean Templater tried and failed. These are different situations and they call for different responses, which we cover below.
One more distinction saves confusion later. Render status is about making the video. If you also use Projector to send finished videos to a streaming or hosting service, there is a second field, stream-status, that tracks the distribution side. A job can be done for rendering and still be on its way to being published. The two fields answer two different questions, so read the one that matches the question you are asking.
What to do when a job sits in each state
A state is only a problem when a job stays in it longer than you expected. Each one has its own short list of likely reasons, and they are not the same list, so here they are one at a time.
A job that stays ready
A job that stays ready usually means no satellite is picking it up. Remember what ready means. The job is prepared, but nobody has claimed it yet. So the question is which machine should be claiming it, and why it is not.
Start with the assignment. Every Que job is assigned to one or more satellites. If a job was created without naming a satellite, Que gives it the campaign’s default satellite. That is convenient, but it also means a job can quietly land on a machine you were not thinking about. Check which satellite the job belongs to before you check anything else, because a perfectly healthy machine will ignore a job that is not assigned to it.
Next, check that the satellite is really able to work. A satellite that exists in Que is not automatically allowed to read your data. It has to be authorized, and the Templater Bot has to be assigned to it with the Assign Bot button in Templater’s QUE Configuration dialog, which you reach from Templater’s Preferences. If either step was skipped, the satellite shows up in your account and still does nothing. Our guide to troubleshooting Que satellites covers the problems that live at that level, such as a satellite that will not add or a profile that will not load, so we will not repeat them here.
Then check what the satellite has been told to look for. When Templater connects to a Que campaign, the Job Selection Setup window lets you narrow the jobs it will process by ID, by render status, by any property value in the job’s data, and by creation date. A filter left over from last week’s test can exclude today’s jobs without any warning. Open the QUE Inspector from that window. It lists the jobs the satellite will process with the current settings. If your job is not on that list, the filter is the reason.
Pagination is the quieter version of the same problem. Templater reads campaign jobs in pages. You set which results page it reads and how many jobs a page holds, anywhere from 5 to 200, and a checkbox lets it process additional pages beyond the first. Our help page gives a worked case. A campaign has 500 jobs, and 200 are already done. You filter by status, read page 1 at 200 jobs per page, turn on additional pages and enter 1. Templater then processes all 300 outstanding jobs. Get those numbers wrong and part of the campaign stays at ready forever while the rest finishes normally, which looks exactly like a bug and is not one.
Last, give it a moment. The Bot checks for new work on a cycle, not continuously, and our documentation notes that right after you enable it you may have to wait for the first check. A job created a few seconds ago that is still ready is usually just early.
A job that stays queued
A queued job has been claimed. It is waiting for its satellite to get to it. Because the Bot moves a whole batch to queued before starting the first job, a long queue on a busy satellite is normal. Look at what the satellite is doing right now. If another job on it is processing, your job is simply in line.
If nothing on that satellite is processing and jobs are still sitting in queued, the machine itself is the place to look. Go to it. The console at the bottom of Templater’s main panel shows what Templater is doing at any moment and prints error messages there as they happen. That readout usually tells you within a few seconds whether Templater is busy, waiting, or stuck on something.
The fix for a long queue that is healthy is capacity, not troubleshooting. Que lets you choose which satellite handles each campaign or job, so you can spread work across more than one machine. That decision belongs to planning, though. Do not reassign jobs mid-batch on a hunch, because our API documentation warns that changing or removing satellites outside Templater or the Que Dash can affect jobs that are already assigned.
A job that stays processing
Processing means Templater is versioning and rendering that job. A long render is not a fault. A long video, a heavy composition or a slow machine all take time. A job that never leaves processing is different, and it is worth checking whether After Effects or Templater has hung on that machine.
This is where the log earns its keep. In Templater’s Preferences, in the Advanced group, you choose the folder where Templater writes its log. If you leave it empty, it writes to the logged-in user’s Documents folder. Click Reset Log to start fresh, which creates templater.out and templater.log and erases whatever was in them before, so copy the old files first if you might need them. Show Log opens templater.out, which is color-coded for reading on screen. The templater.log file has the same messages without the color, and it is the one to send to someone else. When Templater hangs, the last message in the log is the best clue you will get about what it was doing. As of Templater 3.3, it logs all activity whether or not a project is open, so you do not need to reproduce the problem with the right file loaded.
A job that is done
Done means the render completed. It does not mean the file is the one you wanted. Two checks are worth building into your routine.
First, open a sample. A finished render can still contain the wrong text, a missing image the template covered with a fallback, or a layout that broke on an unusually long value. Done is a statement about the pipeline, not about the content.
Second, check the file names. Because the Bot runs without a person watching, it will overwrite an existing file if two jobs produce the same output name. Our documentation is direct about this. Make sure each job’s ID or output value is unique. If you see fewer files than done jobs, a name collision is the first thing to suspect. Our article on custom output file names shows how to build names that cannot collide.
A job that is canceled
Canceled means the job was stopped before it finished. Treat any partial output from it as unreliable. The question to ask is why it was stopped. If someone on your team stopped it on purpose, there may be nothing to do. If nobody knows why, find out before you run it again, because rerunning a job that was stopped for a reason will just repeat the reason.
When you do want a job processed again, the value that tells the pipeline “this one is ready for work” is ready. How you set it depends on how you manage the campaign. Our technical API reference at que-api-docs.dataclay.com is the place to confirm the exact request for updating an existing job in your setup.
A job with an error code
An error code means Templater tried to make the video and hit a failure. The two codes you will see most point in two different directions, so read them carefully.
ERR::MEDIA means Templater could not find or bring in a media file that the job’s data pointed to. The output may still have rendered, with the problem inside it. So do not assume nothing was produced. Look at the job’s data first. A misspelled file name, a link that no longer works, or a path that only exists on another machine are the usual causes, and file references are case-sensitive, so Logo.png and logo.png are not the same file.
ERR::AFXHOST means After Effects itself hit an error. Our documentation says to go to the machine running Templater and look at After Effects, because when you see this code After Effects has probably stopped working normally. Resetting the job will not help until the machine is healthy again. We wrote a longer piece on what happens when a batch fails mid-queue that goes deeper into both codes, including why you should not blindly requeue a media error.
Reading a whole campaign at once
Single jobs are easy. The real skill is looking at a campaign full of states and knowing what the mix is telling you. Here is a scenario of our own, built from the documented behavior.
A marketing team loads 500 jobs into a Que campaign on Monday morning, one for each customer in a spring promotion. Two satellites are assigned. Our guide to inserting a batch of jobs into Que covers that loading step. By lunchtime, the campaign shows 180 jobs done, 6 with ERR::MEDIA, 1 with ERR::AFXHOST, 40 queued, and the rest still ready.
Read that from the top. The 180 done jobs show the pipeline works, so the template and the data shape are sound. The six media errors are almost certainly data problems on six rows. Someone should open those six jobs and look at the asset references, not the template. The single ERR::AFXHOST points at a machine, not a row. Someone should walk over to whichever satellite produced it and see whether After Effects is still running normally there. If it is not, that is also why work has slowed.
Now the 40 queued jobs and the large block of ready jobs. If both satellites are healthy, the queued jobs are just the batch one of them has claimed, and they will drain. The ready jobs are the bigger question. If one satellite is the one that hit the After Effects error, our documentation says After Effects there has likely stopped working normally, so that machine may not be pulling new work, which would leave only one machine on the campaign. That could explain the pile. Fix the machine and the ready jobs start moving again. If both machines are fine and the ready count is not falling, check each satellite’s job filter and page settings in Templater. A Jobs Per Page value set low for an earlier test will leave most of a 500-job campaign untouched.
Notice what the team did not do. They did not reset every non-done job to ready and hope. That would have rerun the six media errors with the same bad data, and it would not have fixed the machine that needed attention. Each state pointed to a different place, and they went to that place.
One caution about the filter in Templater’s Job Selection Setup. Its render status filter offers four choices: Ready, Queued, Processing and Done. Canceled jobs and error codes are not among them. So the filter is the right tool for choosing what a satellite should pick up, and the job records in the campaign itself are where you review the failures. Use each for what it is good at.
If you used Templater with a spreadsheet before Que, much of this will feel familiar, because the Bot uses the same values in a render-status column. Our article on monitoring a Bot queue so one bad row does not stall the batch covers that spreadsheet side. The difference with Que is that the status is a property of the job in the Que campaign, not a cell in a sheet you have to maintain. If you are still deciding how Que fits with Templater in your setup, our explainer on what Que is in Templater is a good place to start.
The bottom line
Render status is a short vocabulary with a clear owner. You write ready. Templater writes everything else, and each value it writes points you somewhere specific. A job stuck at ready points to assignment, authorization or filters. A long queue points to capacity. A job frozen in processing points to the machine and its log. A media error points to the job’s data, and an After Effects error points to the satellite itself. Read the state, go to the place it names, and fix that one thing. That habit is what keeps a 500-job campaign moving instead of turning into an afternoon of guesswork.
Still have a question about a specific state? These are the ones we hear most often.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between ready and queued in Que?
A ready job has all its data and is prepared for processing, but no satellite has claimed it yet. A queued job has been claimed and is waiting in line for its assigned satellite. The Bot moves every ready job it finds to queued at once, then works through them one at a time. So a large block of queued jobs on a busy satellite is normal. A large block of ready jobs that never changes usually means no satellite is picking them up, and you should check the assignment, the authorization and the job filter in Templater.
Can I set a job’s render status to done myself?
You should not. The only value meant for you or your application to write is ready. Queued, processing, done and the error codes are written by Templater as it actually does the work on a satellite. Setting done by hand does not render anything. It only removes the job from the pipeline and makes your records say a video exists when it does not. If a job needs to be processed, leave it at ready or set it back to ready, and let Templater move it forward.
Why is my Que job stuck on ready?
Usually because no satellite is claiming it. Check which satellite the job is assigned to, since a job created without one gets the campaign’s default satellite. Confirm that satellite is authorized and that the Bot is assigned to it in Templater’s QUE Configuration dialog. Then open the QUE Inspector from Job Selection Setup to see whether your current filters and page settings include the job. If the job was created moments ago, give the Bot time to run its next check.
What does ERR::MEDIA mean on a Que job?
It means Templater could not find or bring in a media file referenced in the job’s data. The output may still have rendered, with the media problem inside it, so look before you assume nothing was made. Check the asset references in that job’s data. A misspelled file name, a dead link or a path that only exists on another machine are the usual causes. File references are case-sensitive, so a capital letter in the wrong place is enough to cause it.
What should I do when a job shows ERR::AFXHOST?
Go to the satellite that processed the job and look at After Effects on that machine. This code means After Effects itself hit an error, and when you see it After Effects has probably stopped working normally. Resetting the job will not help until the machine is healthy. Check Templater’s console and log on that machine for the last message before the failure. Once After Effects is running normally again, you can send the job back for processing.
Can I filter canceled or failed jobs in Templater’s Job Selection Setup?
The render status filter in Job Selection Setup offers four choices: Ready, Queued, Processing and Done. Canceled jobs and error codes are not among them. Use the filter to decide which jobs a satellite should pick up, and review the jobs that failed or were canceled from the campaign’s own job records. You can also filter by job ID, by a property value in the job’s data and by creation date, which helps when you want a satellite to work on a specific slice of a campaign.
Is render status the same as stream status?
No. Render status tracks making the video, from ready through done or an error. Stream status is a separate field used when Projector distributes finished videos to a streaming or hosting service, and it tracks that delivery from start to live. A job can be done for rendering and still be moving through distribution. When you are asking whether a video was made, read render status. When you are asking whether it was published, read stream status.
