Whether you’re a solo motion designer, part of a small studio, or working within a large enterprise, Templater® for Adobe After Effects® is a powerful workflow automation tool that can transform your repetitive customization tasks into a streamlined solution by linking your AE projects to external data sources. But no one licensing model is a fit for all users and teams.
Thankfully, Dataclay offers several ways to access Templater’s power, ensuring there’s a fit for various workflows and budgets. In this Templater Licensing Guide, let’s break down the options to help you find the best fit for your video production needs.
Table of Contents
Start with a Free 30-Day Trial
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Have you downloaded the free 30-day trial of Templater? |
The best way to determine if Templater will meet your needs is to evaluate it with our 30-day free trial. The trial provides a fully-featured version of Templater Bot, meaning you get access to almost all capabilities of the Rig, Pro, and Bot editions. The only restriction is watermarked outputs, file and comp replication are disabled, and access to the CLI is unavailable.
Selecting the Appropriate Templater Edition
Once you’ve had a chance to evaluate Templater and better understand which features meet your automation needs, it’s time to pick the edition of Templater that best fits your workflows.
Templater Rig: A Low Cost Perpetual License
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Do you need to render or replicate many videos automatically? |
Templater Rig is our entry-level product and a vital part of the Templater ecosystem. It’s offered as a perpetual license, meaning it’s a one-time purchase. Rig allows you to prepare an After Effects project file for dynamic content, map data from a data source (like Google Sheets, TSV, JSON, or QUE) to your project file layers, and preview how dynamic elements change as data is processed. This is a tremendous value for previewing versioning data inside After Effects.
Templater Rig is ideal if you find swapping content in your After Effects project takes too much time. It’s perfect for artists who need to prepare a template to be rendered later by someone using Templater Pro or Bot, or if you want to create an After Effects project compatible with Templater to sell or distribute as a template. Rig also uniquely offers free upgrades anytime new versions of Templater are released.
While not designed for batch output, Rig is capable of rendering individual jobs using After Effects’ built-in render options. This can be a powerful solution for small versioning projects. Rig is also a strategic part of creative team workflows, allowing multiple users to preview data and test rigged template designs without needing a Pro or Bot license activation. At under $70 for a perpetual license, Rig is an incredible value.
Furthermore, Rig has interesting uses you might not expect, such as being used for live events with After Effects and NDI to incorporate live data. It can also be used to version After Effects content embedded in Adobe Premiere using the Dynamic Link feature.
Finally, Rig is also the gateway to Dataclay’s on-demand subscriptionless payment option: QUE Meter.
Templater Pro: Desktop Batch Processing
Stepping up from Rig, Templater Pro adds desktop automation capabilities. It includes all the features of Rig and extends them to allow you to render or replicate batches of versioned compositions using data from your data source. Pro is the right choice when your clients require a quick turnaround for many unique videos based on customer data, or when your studio has multiple artists working concurrently on variations of a master composition. If you purchase a Templater-compatible After Effects project or MoGRT and want to quickly create many unique versions based on your data, Pro is designed for this. Pro supports batch rendering with Adobe Media Encoder. Templater Pro is available via an unlimited usage subscription or prepaid license period at $225/month.
Templater Bot: Full Automation & Enterprise Solution
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Do you need to fully automate video rendering without clicking a button? |
For complete automation and enterprise-level workflows, there’s Templater Bot. Bot includes all the functionality of both Rig and Pro and allows you to build automated video systems. Bot can operate as a background process, checking for incoming data periodically, pulling it in, and rendering videos automatically. It can also be controlled via a command line interface (CLI), offering flexibility for integrating Templater into existing automated production pipelines.
With Bot, you can automatically create videos without a human operator, process extremely large data sets, and run scripts triggered by Templater processes. Developers can leverage Bot’s capabilities to create web or mobile applications that feed data into Templater’s data source to create dynamic videos based on user input. Bot operates After Effects for you and can re-version projects as a background process without needing the After Effects user interface open. Templater Bot is also available via an unlimited usage subscription or prepaid license period at $450/month.
Additionally, Bot allows developers to hook into Templater’s reversioning and rendering process. In fact, users can literally build their own features using their custom code – both inside and outside AE.
QUE Meter: Affordable Access to Bot and QUE
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Do you want 24/7 on-demand video creation WITHOUT a subscription? |
What if you own a Rig license and primarily do creative setup and previewing, but occasionally have a batch rendering need without wanting to commit to a monthly Pro or Bot subscription? Dataclay offers a flexible solution with the QUE Meter on-demand offering for Rig owners.
This option provides full Templater Bot and QUE functionality on a per-render basis. You only need your Rig license to get started. With QUE Meter, you can access the power of automated batch processing and leverage QUE (our secure, JSON-based data store and API designed for dynamic video data) without a subscription commitment. Pricing for this on-demand model is 20 cents per rendered output (or credit). This is an excellent option for Rig owners who need occasional batch rendering capabilities and want to utilize the advanced data management features of QUE without a recurring subscription cost.
One final use case for QUE Meter: building a POC (Proof of Concept). There’s no more cost-effective way to build and test a production-ready workflow than using QUE Meter’s credit-based approach. 50 credits can be purchased for $10 USD – and they won’t expire for an entire year! For low-volume scenarios, that’s everything you need for a year of on-demand functionality under $80 USD, including the Rig license.
Additional Licensing Considerations
Once you have decided on the Templater edition that best suits your needs, there are several additional licensing options you’ll need to consider:
Node-Locked vs. Floating Licenses
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Do you need to run Templater on a virtual machine? |
The “standard” type of Templater license is a node-locked license. This refers to the way licensing system is implemented on your machine, and it can be activated and deactivated if you desire to move it to another computer. It can also be deactivated remotely from the admin panel via the Dataclay website. Most users are best served by a node-locked license.
Do you need to run Templater on a virtual machine in the cloud? Or do you have a number of Templater users who will be sharing a pool of Templater activations? These are two scenarios that may best be served by Templater’s floating license model.
In order to use a Templater floating license, you must first install a licensing server on a separate machine (one that won’t be using Templater). This machine will act as a licensing server for the floating license activations you purchase with a single floating license key.
Note that floating licenses are more expensive than node-locked licenses and the number of activations purchased will still determine the number of simultaneous Templater users just like node-locked.
Templater Activations
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Do you need to run Templater on multiple machines simultaneously? |
One of the most common questions we hear is “can I run Templater on multiple computers?”
The answer is both “yes” and “no.”
When you purchase a license of Templater and “activate” the license key inside the Templater preference panel, you have the option to deactivate that license and move the installation to another computer at any time. In this way, a single installation of Templater can be used on any computer (Mac or Windows) as long as it has been deactivated elsewhere.
If you wish to use Templater on multiple computers SIMULTANEOUSLY, then you will need to purchase the number of activations as computers you want to use at the same time. Multiple activations can be purchased for Templater Rig, Pro, and Bot online simply by increasing the quantity of that edition in the shopping cart prior to checkout.
Tiered discounts are applied to activations – 10% for 2 or more, 15% 5 or more, and 20% 10 and above. Additional activations can be added to existing subscriptions of Pro and Bot at any time.
Recurring Subscription vs. Prepaid License
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Do you want a monthly auto-renewing Templater subscription? |
For some, the convenience of a recurring subscription is a freedom, but for others it may feel restrictive. That’s why Dataclay offers both recurring subscriptions AND prepaid license options. But there are several details you might overlook when making this decision.
While a prepaid license may seem to be the logical choice when trying to avoid an unnecessary charge at the end of your license period, it is important to understand that prepaid license keys can not be renewed. That means that if you decide to continue using Templater when the prepaid term of your license expires, you’ll need to purchase an entirely new license key and replace it inside the Templater preference panel.
Additionally, it is important to know that Templater renewing subscriptions can be set to “manual” renewal. This will avoid any potential auto-renewal charge while giving users the option to extend their current license key another subscription cycle. This subscription feature provides the best of both options.
License Duration
When you purchase a subscription or prepaid Templater license, you will need to select the duration. The choices are the same for both: 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month.
Only annual subscriptions include a discount: 12 months for the price of 10 months.
Aside from the convenience of an annual payment and the additional cost savings, one of the primary advantages of an annual subscription is that for 24/7 usage, Templater won’t be disrupted every time the subscription renewal status must be checked. This is a technical problem we see occasionally impact monthly subscribers that could easily and best be avoided simply by choosing a longer renewal period.
