Que and Projector do different jobs at opposite ends of the same pipeline. Que holds the data your videos are built from, and Projector takes the finished renders and gets them rendered faster and delivered to where viewers are, so which one you need depends on whether your bottleneck is the content going in or the files coming out.
People often ask us to pick one, as if they were two answers to the same question. They are not. In fact, they are designed to be used together, and Projector lists Que as one of its data integrations. But you can use either alone, and plenty of teams do. This article is for the person standing between them with a real project, trying to work out which to spend time on first.
The two products in one paragraph each
Que is a cloud-based data source for videos rigged with Templater. It is JSON-based, you can enter content through its web interface without knowing JSON, and it has a built-in API and a Zapier integration. It organizes work into Autografs, Jobs, Campaigns and Satellites, and its dashboard shows job status and how your rendering machines are being used. Its job is to hold and route the content for every version of a video.
Projector is a desktop app for Windows and Mac that renders multiple customized videos at the same time and automates their distribution. It uses the After Effects rendering engine in parallel, based on how many cores your machine has. If the machine has eight cores, Projector renders eight videos at once. It can transcode as part of each render, send results to supported platforms, make GIF clips and poster images, archive to secure storage, and write metadata back to your data source. It runs locally.
Read those two paragraphs again and you can see the shape. Que is about what goes into a video. Projector is about what happens after the video exists. Neither one designs anything, and neither one replaces Templater, the After Effects plugin that both of them work with.
Your bottleneck decides the order
The simplest way to choose is to ask where your time actually goes.
If you spend your hours getting content into the right place, you have a data problem. Names arrive in one file and photos in another. Somebody retypes a corrected price in three spots. A campaign needs four people to contribute and nobody knows which version is current. Every one of those is a problem Que was built for, and none of them gets better by rendering faster. You would simply produce the wrong videos sooner.
If your content is tidy and your hours disappear into waiting, exporting and uploading, you have an output problem. The sheet is clean, the template works, and then you sit and watch videos render one after another, and then you hand-upload each finished file to a platform and paste the link back into a spreadsheet. That is the territory Projector covers. Faster rendering helps here because you have something worth rendering.
A lot of teams discover they have both, but almost nobody has both equally. One of the two is the worse pain. Fix that one first. The relief from the first fix will tell you whether the second is worth the effort at all.
When Que is the better fit
Choose Que first when the trouble is on the data side. The clearest signals are several people supplying content, content arriving from apps or forms rather than from someone’s files, and a need to see the status of work across machines.
Que also earns its keep when security is part of the brief. Data inside it is encrypted end to end with field-level masking where appropriate, and decryption happens only when an authorized client requests the data. If your videos carry customer information, that is an actual reason, not a feature to admire.
And if you want other software to start videos for you, Que’s API and its Zapier connection to more than 5,000 apps are how that happens. A form submission becomes a Job, a Job becomes a video. Projector has no equivalent role in that chain, because it is not where requests come in.
A concrete case helps. Imagine a training company that sends each new learner a short welcome video with their name, course and start date. Registrations come from an online form. The company wants the video made as soon as someone signs up, and the operations team wants to see what has gone out. The hard parts there are intake and tracking, and Que covers both. Whether the videos then render one at a time or several at once is a second-order question.
When Projector is the better fit
Choose Projector first when your content is already in good shape and your pain is throughput and delivery.
The strongest case is volume with a deadline. Parallel rendering across the cores of a machine means a large set of versions finishes sooner than the same set rendered in sequence. We should be straightforward about what that does and does not mean. It makes use of the cores you own. It does not add machines, and it does not change what a single render costs. If your machine is modest, you still have a modest machine, just used more fully. On the Templater side, rendering can also be spread across several machines running Bot, and that is a separate lever.
The second case is delivery. Projector integrates out of the box with Vimeo, JW Player, Frame.io and AWS S3, and it can create the supporting assets, GIF clips and poster images, that marketing teams usually make by hand. For anyone who has uploaded forty videos to a platform and then copied forty links into a sheet, the appeal is easy to see. Projector reads metadata from the streaming platform and writes it back to your data source, so an email or SMS campaign can use the link without anyone pasting it.
The third case is control over format. Projector can transcode as part of each render and distribute payload, and the page says you get more formats to choose from than After Effects offers natively. If your delivery spec is picky, that is worth checking against your own list.
Take a regional news group that makes a daily set of short clips and publishes each to a streaming account and a cloud bucket. The data is a feed that already works. What the team needs is for renders to run side by side, come out in the right format and land in the right places without a person babysitting them. That is the Projector case.
Where each one is not the answer
A fair comparison includes the limits, so here they are.
Que is not a renderer. It will not make a video faster, and it has no role in sending files to a platform. If your content lives in one tidy Google Sheet that one person owns, Que adds a second system you do not yet have a reason to run. Our post on five tested data sources for Templater covers the other data sources Templater reads, and any of them may be enough.
Projector is not a data tool. It reads data from Que or from Google Sheets, and it does not manage or secure that content. If your real problem is content sprawl, Projector will deliver that sprawl faster. It is also a local, desktop application. That is a deliberate choice, described as keeping your assets visible to nobody but you, and it suits teams that value that. It is also a limit, because it is not a hosted service you can reach from a browser.
Neither one is the right pick if your problem is a template that breaks. A name that is too long, footage that runs the wrong length, text that overflows a box, those are layout problems, and they get solved in the template with Templater’s layout rules and Time Sculpting. Do not buy a data product or a rendering product to fix a design problem.
There is a third route that costs neither. Templater Pro itself batch renders, and it can send replicated compositions to Adobe Media Encoder. For a modest volume that is often enough on its own. We described the editions and what each covers in our Templater licensing guide, and our look at speeding up After Effects exports goes into render-side options.
How the choice looks from each chair
The same decision feels different depending on who you are, and it helps to name the seat you are sitting in.
If you are the motion designer, your daily life is the template. You care that the composition holds up when real data arrives, and you probably care less about where the data sits. For you, Que matters mostly as a promise that you will stop receiving content in six formats from five people. Projector matters mostly as a promise that you will stop babysitting an export queue. Both are quality-of-life changes more than creative ones, and neither alters how you build.
If you are the producer or operations lead, your concern is predictability. Que’s dashboard shows each job’s status and how hard your rendering machines are working, which is exactly the view a producer wants when a deadline is near. Projector’s value to you is fewer manual steps between a finished render and a live link, and fewer chances for someone to upload the wrong file.
If you are the developer, you are looking for places to plug in. Que has an API and Zapier. Templater has a command line interface and an Event Scripts API, and our GitHub repository includes sample scripts and documentation for Windows, Mac and Node.js. Projector is the piece with the least to integrate on the input side, because it reads from Que or Google Sheets, and the most on the output side, because it knows how to hand results to the platforms you already use.
If you are the person who signs the budget, you want to know what you are not buying. Neither product is a replacement for After Effects or for Templater. Both are additions, and each solves a narrower problem than the suite as a whole. That is good news for a cautious buyer, because you can add one, measure the effect on a real project, and decide on the other with evidence.
Questions to ask before you buy either
These are the questions we would ask ourselves if we were in your position.
How many people touch the content before a video is made? If the answer is one, hold off on Que. If it is several, the case grows quickly.
Where do the finished videos need to end up? If the answer is “in a folder,” Projector’s distribution features are not your priority. If the answer is a streaming account, a storage bucket and a marketing tool, they probably are.
What does a bad day look like? Perhaps it is a wrong value sent to the wrong person, which is a data day. Perhaps it is a batch that was still rendering at the deadline, which is an output day. Name the failure you fear most and buy the tool aimed at it.
Do you have a machine worth using in parallel? Projector uses the cores you have. A modest machine used fully is still modest. If your constraint is hardware, the most effective step may be more machines running Templater Bot, which our FAQ says cuts total production time roughly in proportion to the number of machines.
What does your security team need to see? Que is a hosted, encrypted data service. Projector keeps rendering local. One of those will be easier to approve in your organization than the other, and it is better to learn that early than in the week you planned to launch.
Using them together
Once both pains are real, the combination is straightforward, and it is the reason the suite is built the way it is.
Que is the data source. Templater, running on your machines, builds each composition from a Job. Projector renders those in parallel, transcodes them, sends them to Vimeo or storage, and writes the resulting metadata back to the data source, where Que, or a sheet, holds it. An email or SMS step can then pick up the link. Content comes in at one end and delivered, tracked video comes out at the other.
That loop is the strongest argument for the pair. Without the write-back, someone copies links by hand. Without parallel rendering, the batch takes as long as it takes. Without a shared data source, every step depends on one person’s file. Each tool removes one of those manual handoffs.
You do not need to buy everything on day one, though. Teams commonly start with Templater and a sheet, add Projector when output becomes the wall, and add Que when the data side outgrows the sheet. There is a downloadable trial for Projector, a free version of Que to try, and a 30-day fully featured trial of Templater, so you can test each against your own work before committing. For wider context, see our post on data-driven video across six dimensions.
The bottom line
If your problem is getting the right content into the right video, start with Que. If your problem is getting finished videos made quickly and delivered without handwork, start with Projector. If the honest answer is that a spreadsheet and Templater Pro already do the job, then keep it that way and spend the effort on your template.
Que is where the work begins. Projector is where it ends. Pick the end of the pipe that is currently hurting.
Before you decide, here are the questions teams ask us when they are weighing the two.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use Projector without Que?
Yes. Projector’s listed data integrations include Que and Google Sheets, so a Google Sheet works as the data source. It renders customized videos in parallel and distributes them without Que being involved. Add Que later if your content starts coming from apps or several teams.
Can I use Que without Projector?
Yes. Que holds the data and tracks Jobs, and the videos render on your own machines running After Effects and Templater. Projector is optional and is aimed at parallel rendering and automated distribution. If you only render occasionally and deliver by hand, Que alone may be all you need.
Which one makes my renders faster?
Projector. It uses the After Effects rendering engine in parallel based on the number of cores in your machine, so an eight-core machine renders eight videos at once. Que does not render. It organizes the data and shows the status of jobs and machine use. Faster output from Que would only come from better organization of the work.
Where do the videos get delivered?
Projector sends finished videos to supported platforms. Out of the box it integrates with Vimeo, JW Player, Frame.io and AWS S3. It can also produce GIF clips and poster images and archive to secure storage. Check the current integration list on the Projector page against your own destinations before you commit.
Do either of these work in the cloud?
Que is a cloud-based app. Projector is built as a local desktop application, so it renders on your own machine and your assets stay with you. Which one fits depends on whether you need a shared hosted data source, local rendering, or both.
Do I need Templater for both?
Yes, in practice. Que is the data source for videos rigged with Templater, and Projector renders Templater-customized videos. Templater is the plugin inside After Effects that rigs the template and applies the data. The other two products work alongside it.
What should I try first?
Try the one that addresses the hour you lose most often. If it is content wrangling, try Que’s free version. If it is waiting and uploading, download the Projector trial. Run it against a real batch of your own work, because that tells you more than any description.
