Que is the part of Dataclay that holds your video data and your list of render jobs in one place, on the web, so that Templater can pull its instructions from there instead of from a spreadsheet. If you already make videos from a Google Sheet and it works, you may never need it. If the sheet has started to feel like a fragile pile of columns, Que is what we built for that moment.
We make both products, so treat this as the maker’s explanation. Everything below comes from our own help documentation for Que and Templater. Where that documentation is quiet, we say so rather than fill the gap with a guess.
What Que is and who it is for
Our documentation describes Que as a dual-purpose, web-based application, designed primarily for people who use Templater. The first purpose is data management. Que stores your video data as JSON, which frees you from the limits of tabular sources such as spreadsheets. Those sources are fine at a few dozen rows. They get unwieldy as the volume and the complexity of your production grows. The second purpose is the Que Meter, which we cover further down.
Two groups of people use Que, and the help site speaks to them separately. The first group is producers, designers and editors. They work in the Que Dash, a web application where you point and click to set up campaigns and insert jobs. If you are comfortable with a spreadsheet, the Dash will feel familiar even though it is not one. The second group is developers. They build an app or service that lets end users order customized video on demand, and they connect it to Que through its API. Our documentation says the API is meant for professional developers with integration experience.
There is one requirement that surprises people. Que does not render anything by itself. To get the most from it, our documentation says you should have Adobe After Effects and Templater Bot. Que holds the data and the queue. A machine running After Effects and Templater does the rendering. That split explains most of the vocabulary, so it is worth learning the words before anything else.
The four components, and how they fit together
Que has four moving parts, plus the dashboard that shows them to you. We have a longer walkthrough of the first one in our complete guide to Autografs, so here is the short version of each.
An Autograf is a video template whose layers have been rigged to accept dynamic data from Templater. You author it in After Effects, then use Templater to export a manifest, a JSON description of what is happening inside the rigged project, and upload it to Que. Once it is in Que, both campaigns and jobs can use it. The manifest records things such as the dynamic text, footage and pre-composition layers, plus the fonts and effects the project depends on. That last part matters later, when we get to satellites.
A campaign is a container for jobs. Our documentation describes it as your video re-versioning project, and it gives you control over how many renders a client gets and which rendering resources do the work. When you create one, you choose a default Autograf and a default satellite, which any newly inserted job uses when it does not name its own. An agency, for example, could keep one campaign per client and give access to a given campaign only to the people who work on it. You can also configure a campaign to mask, or encrypt, specific properties of its jobs. Templater decrypts them right before the data appears in a layer or renders into output.
A job holds the data for one output. Each job is a JSON object of key-value pairs that Templater reads to adjust the layers of the composition and to control After Effects itself. A job can carry the customization data, such as a name or a price. It can also carry configuration, such as which render settings and output module After Effects should use and what the output file should be called. If you come from spreadsheets, our API documentation offers the easy translation: a job is a row, its keys are the column headers and its values are the cells.
A satellite is a machine that processes jobs into output. This is the piece people misread. A satellite is not a server we host for you. It is your own computer, running After Effects and Templater, that you register with Que. The help site calls satellites authorized machines, and the API documentation describes them as machines running an instance of After Effects in your environment that request data from Que through Templater.
Finally there is the Dash, at que.dataclay.com. You sign in with the same identity you used to check out with your Que plan, and from there you can browse your Autografs, campaigns, jobs and satellites. The account area is also where you find the API key and the organization key that Templater needs.
Setting up your first satellite and campaign
The order of setup is fixed by dependencies, and our documentation states them plainly. You must have at least one satellite before you can create a campaign. You must also have at least one Autograf, because a campaign needs a default one. Jobs come last, because a job always lives inside a campaign.
Adding a satellite happens inside Templater, not in the Dash. You open Templater’s Preferences, go to the Data Source group and open the Que Configuration dialog. Templater must already be authorized to reach your Que account. You paste your organization key into the Machine Profile area and click Load Profile. Templater then reads the properties of the machine and shows them to you. Our documentation says the profile includes Templater’s output path and version number, the operating system, the capacity of the root drive, the installed RAM and a list of every installed font and effect. Then you click Add to Que. The satellite takes the name of the host machine.
That naming rule produces most of the troubleshooting in the help site. Every satellite in an organization must be uniquely named. A host name with unusual characters can fail, and our advice is to simplify it to a small set of basic characters with no punctuation or spaces. Hitting the limit of satellites on your plan can also stop the add. The troubleshooting table lists the fixes, and the first one the table lists is to clear the profile in Templater, load it again and retry. If you want to rename a satellite later, you rename the host machine first and then sync the machine profile.
The profile exists for a practical reason. For a job to render, the satellite must have the job’s Autograf installed along with everything the Autograf depends on, such as fonts and effects. Our documentation says you must set up your own way to get those files onto each machine, for example a sync folder service such as Google Drive or Dropbox, so every satellite holds the latest Autograf, and you may still need to install and activate specific fonts and effects on each one. If you skip this, a job assigned to a machine that lacks a font is the sort of thing you meet at render time.
Creating the campaign is quick by comparison. In the Dash you open the Campaigns view, click New Campaign, name it, pick the default Autograf and the default satellite, and submit. After that you insert jobs. You can create one at a time from the campaign table, or import a batch. The Dash accepts a JSON file that contains a single array of objects, a Microsoft Excel file with a header row, or a CSV or TSV file. During the import you choose the satellite that will process the jobs and the Autograf that will use the data. Your own application can do the same through the API instead.
How Templater uses Que, with an example
Picture a small agency that makes personalized offer videos for a retail client. It has one rigged template, two machines in the office with After Effects and Templater installed, and a customer list that arrives as an Excel file with a header row. The designer registers both machines as satellites. She uploads the Autograf manifest, creates a campaign called after the client and picks the template and the first machine as defaults. Then she imports the customer file through Batch Import, choosing a satellite and the Autograf in the import dialog. Each row becomes one job in the campaign. We built this example from the documented steps. It is not a customer story.
On the Templater side, the designer clicks the Que logo button under Batch Assets, signs in through the browser, grants Templater permission to read her campaign data and returns to authorize. After she links the campaign, the Job Selection Setup lets her filter which jobs to work on. Our documentation lists four filters: the job ID, the render status, specific property values such as a layer name, and a creation date range. The render status filter offers four values, Ready, Queued, Processing and Done. She can then open the Que Inspector to see exactly which jobs her filter picked before she commits to it.
Pagination deserves a note, because it trips people up. Templater shows jobs in pages of 5 to 200. Our documentation gives an example with a campaign of 500 jobs where 200 are already done. You filter by status, set the page size to 200, turn on the option to process additional pages and enter 1. Templater then works through the 300 outstanding jobs. She can also step through the data in After Effects with the forward and backward arrows in the Preview Data Merge section, to see how each job’s properties will look before a single frame renders.
A new job’s render status defaults to ready, according to the API documentation. That is the signal that a job is waiting to be picked up. The documentation also says that if a job does not specify an Autograf or a satellite, Que fills in the campaign’s defaults. We do not have a help page that defines what each status means at the moment of a failure, and we are not going to invent one. If you rely on statuses for monitoring, test them on a small campaign first.
The API, Zapier and the security model
Developers get a documented workflow: authenticate, sign in from Templater, create a satellite, create an Autograf, create a campaign, create jobs. You generate an API key on the Account page of the Dash and send it as a bearer token in the request header. The help site’s advice is to store it in a variable in your API tool, never to share or post it, and to generate a new one if you think it leaked. Generating a new key invalidates the old one, so any other integration using the old key needs the new value.
The endpoints we document follow the same objects. Satellites are created and authorized with their own endpoints, though the help site notes that people normally do that through Templater. Templates, campaigns and jobs have endpoints of their own, and there is a batch endpoint for creating many jobs at once. The help site warns that updating or removing a satellite outside Templater or the Dash can harm existing jobs, so proceed with caution there. A related fact from the satellite pages: if you delete a satellite, the jobs assigned to it become unassigned, and you must reassign them to another authorized satellite before processing can continue.
If you do not want to write code, there is a first-party Que app on Zapier. Its triggers are New Job and Updated Job, and its actions are Insert Job and Update Job. You connect it with your API key, a nickname for the connection and the API URL, which is pre-filled with the default. Our Zapier guide covers the Templater side of the same idea. Zapier also answers a common question from our FAQ. You can use Google Sheets and Que together by setting Que as Templater’s data source and connecting the sheet through the API or the Zapier integration.
On security, our documentation names two features. Field Level Masking scrambles sensitive demographic data, and all data is encrypted at rest with the AES-256-GCM specification. Roles control who sees what in the Dash. An Account Owner or Administrator can read and write satellites, campaigns and templates. A Collaborator can read them. A Billing Admin has no access to those three areas. Our documentation says only the account owner can remove users or cancel the plan.
Plans, the free trial and the Que Meter
Que comes in a Solo plan and a Team plan. Solo allows one user and two satellites. Team allows five users and five satellites. Both list unlimited jobs and unlimited campaigns, and both include data encryption, integration endpoints, dashboard access and API access. If you need more satellites than your plan holds, our documentation says you can buy more slots. We are not quoting fees here. Our help page lists several price tiers whose pairing with the plans is unclear in the text, so see the Que page on our site for current pricing.
There is a free trial, and by default it is limited to 50 jobs. Templater and Que are separate subscriptions at the moment, and we do not sell them as a bundle. An annual Que subscription is available through Dataclay sales rather than online.
The Que Meter is the other way in, and it suits a different buyer. It combines Que with Templater so you can pay as you go. You buy credits, and each customized output uses one credit. Our documentation counts spot checks, replicas and renders as outputs. Credits come in packs of 50, 100, 250 or 500, and there is a limit of 1,000 credits per Meter account. Past 1,000 outputs in a month, our FAQ says a subscription becomes the better value. Two practical limits apply. The computer must stay online and able to reach Que, because the Meter counts usage as you work, which the subscription editions do not require. And if you run Templater Bot on the Meter and the credits run out, the Bot stops and disables itself. You top up and turn it back on, and it picks up where it left off. Our Que Meter introduction goes deeper.
When Que is the wrong choice
Que is not free of trade-offs, and a few of them are worth stating before you commit. It does not balance work across machines. Our FAQ says Que offers no load balancing at this time, so you assign jobs to satellites yourself, and you must check that each machine has the fonts and plugins the job needs. It adds moving parts: a web app, an organization key, an API key and registered machines, where a spreadsheet adds only a link. And it only pays off if you actually have what it was built for. A small batch from a Google Sheet, run on one machine, is a job Templater already does well without it. You can read more about that trade in our Que versus Templater comparison and see where the sibling product fits in Que versus Projector. For the wider picture, the Que page and our Learn hub are the places to start.
The bottom line is simple. Choose Que when your data has outgrown a spreadsheet, when other software needs to feed jobs into your videos, when several machines should work from one central set of jobs that you assign to them, or when you want the pay-as-you-go route through the Meter. Stay with a sheet when the batch is small and one machine can handle it. Either way, Templater does the rendering, so the real question is only where your data and your queue should live.
Those are the questions we hear most often from people deciding whether Que belongs in their setup. The answers come from our own help pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need Que to use Templater?
No. Templater can read Google Sheets, tab-separated files, and JSON files or feeds without Que. Que is the option for JSON-based data management, for keeping one central set of jobs for several machines, and for connecting your own app or an automation tool. It is also home to the Que Meter. If one machine renders a modest batch from a sheet, you can stay with the sheet and add Que later when the sheet becomes hard to manage.
What is the difference between a campaign, a job and a satellite in Que?
A job is one row of data, stored as a JSON object, that describes a single output. A campaign is the container that holds many jobs and sets a default Autograf and a default satellite for them. A satellite is a machine of yours, running After Effects and Templater, that processes the jobs into video files. Jobs merge into an Autograf, campaigns contain jobs, and satellites turn jobs into output.
Does Que render my videos in the cloud?
Que does not render for you. It stores the data and the jobs on the web, and the rendering happens on machines you register as satellites. Each one needs After Effects and Templater installed, plus the Autograf and its fonts and effects. Our documentation says you should plan how Autografs and their dependencies reach every satellite, for example with a sync folder service.
How many satellites and users does a Que plan include?
The Solo plan lists one user and two satellites. The Team plan lists five users and five satellites. Both list unlimited jobs and campaigns. Our help pages say you can buy extra satellite slots when your plan runs out. For current pricing, see the Que page on our site, because the fee table in our documentation does not map cleanly to the plans.
Can I send jobs to Que from my own app or from another tool?
Yes. The Que API lets your application create jobs one at a time or in batches, and it authenticates with an API key sent as a bearer token. If you prefer no code, Dataclay maintains a Que app on Zapier with New Job and Updated Job triggers and Insert Job and Update Job actions. Keep the API key private, and know that generating a new key invalidates the old one.
How is the Que Meter different from a Que subscription?
The Meter is pay as you go. You buy credits in packs of 50, 100, 250 or 500, and each output, including spot checks and replicas, uses one credit. An account holds up to 1,000 credits. The computer must stay online while you work, and a Templater Bot on the Meter turns itself off when credits run out. Templater Pro and Bot subscriptions do not need the constant internet connection the Meter uses to count credits.
Does Que balance jobs across my machines automatically?
Not today. Our FAQ says Que does not offer load balancing of jobs at this time. You assign jobs to specific satellites yourself, and you need to confirm that each satellite has the fonts, plugins and other resources the job requires. If you delete a satellite, its jobs become unassigned and need a new satellite before processing can continue.
