Templater
Templater is an Adobe® After Effects® plugin that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating customized videos. It empowers you to quickly and easily produce a large volume of beautiful videos that will resonate with your audience.
Requires
Adobe® After Effects® version CS5 or later
Compatible with
MacOS (up to 11.1 Big Sur; M1 via Rosetta 2)
Windows
Feature overview
Why use it?
The ability to produce customized videos at scale gives organizations a strategic advantage. Videos customized for specific viewers, interests or situations help forge a stronger connection with your brand.
Producing a large volume of customized videos is normally a tedious, time-consuming process. Templater automates that process, saving content creators time and money — not to mention boredom.
Efficiency is great. But even more importantly, Templater helps you make beautiful videos that will make you proud.
how it works
Through a simple interface, Templater lets you mark layers in your After Effects project as dynamic — including text, footage, and solid layers — and map those layers to an internal or external data source, such as a Google Sheet. And then sit back and let Templater do the heavy lifting.
Based on rules you define, Templater will magically insert the mapped data into your layers while intelligently preserving your temporal and visual design choices. Voilà, Templater has rendered batches of customized videos for you. Watch the magic happen in the screencasts.
Start your engines
Immediately after installing Templater, you can work in trial mode for 30 days before deciding to purchase a license. Trial mode begins upon date of installation and includes all features from all editions.
During the trial, dynamic layers render with a superimposed watermark and batch replication works only when using Adobe® Media Encoder®. When the trial ends, all features cease functioning.
Version 2.9.5 | Build 9431 | 290MB ZIP Archive
powerful editions
Each edition of Templater gives you a unique superpower.
Explore pricing and compare features to find what works best for you.
A licensing fee schedule is also available for download.
Templater Rig
/ Perpetual License
Rig gives you the tools to prepare an After Effects project file for dynamic content. Map your data to composition layers and preview how those layers change as the data is processed.
Rig is perfect when . . .
- Swapping content in your AE project takes too much of your time.
- You need to prepare an AE project for a different machine running Pro or Bot.
- You want to create an AE project compatible with Templater to sell or distribute as a template.
Templater Pro
/ Subscription License
Pro ships with Rig functionality in addition to features that let you batch render or batch replicate re-versioned master compositions using your data source.
Pro is perfect when . . .
- Your client has a database of customer information and they require a quick turnaround for many unique videos based on that data.
- Your studio has multiple artists who need to work concurrently on different variations of a master composition.
- You have purchased an AE project compatible with Templater and want to create many unique versions of it using your data.
Templater Bot
/ Subscription License
Bot ships with Rig and Pro functionality and lets you build automated video systems. Check periodically for incoming data to kick-off new, unique renders. Or use the command line to push data in to create new renders.
Bot is perfect when . . .
- You need to create videos on demand without human intervention.
- You need command line interface control to re-version AE projects.
- You want to develop web or mobile apps that create dynamic videos based on user input.
compare editions
Click any feature listed to read more
Map your spreadsheet or JSON data directly into AE composition layers. Use Google Sheets in the cloud or tabbed-separated-value files exported from Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, or Google Sheets. You can also use a plain text file containing a JSON object array exported from your own app
Footage sources for your dynamic layers in your AE project can come from local or cloud-based resources.
When updating an AE composition with your data, Templater intelligently adjusts dynamic layers relative to their containing composition and other sibling layers. No need to futz with aligning, scaling, or positioning dynamic layers—let Templater craft your composition according to your layout rules.
Use time-based rules to crop, trim, shift, and stretch layers using Templater’s patent-pending Time Sculpting feature. There’s no need to worry about integrating footage sources of varying duration into a video template. Now Templater can maintain the design integrity of your video while processing footage of different lengths.
Insert characters from any language into your spreadsheet and see them appear in your text layers. Of course, installed fonts should have the glyphs you require. Templater reads your text as it appears in your spreadsheet, so commas, quotes, apostrophes, and new lines are accepted. Right-to-left scripts are also supported.
Use project file presets to store the Data source, Footage folder, and Output folder references within your After Effects project template file for easy reuse.
With a click of a button, preview how your data-driven compositions will look prior to rendering or replicating. Iterate through previews of your render jobs to see how Templater treats different text, footage, and colors. Resolve problematic data quickly and effectively.
Want to know what Templater is doing at any given time? Inspect its log files for full transparency. Troubleshooting Templater has never been easier.
Templater can quickly re-version a master composition with your data and replicate it so you can work your mograph magic on it before rendering. Replicated comps are kept tidy and organized within a clean folder structure. You also have the option to send replicated comps to AE’s render queue or the Adobe Media Encoder.
With a click of a button, preview how your data-driven compositions will look prior to rendering or replicating. Iterate through previews of your render jobs to see how Templater treats different text, footage, and colors. Resolve problematic data quickly and effectively.
Send a batch of replicated compositions to Adobe Media Encoder to render.
Set a custom output file name for each render job or replicated comp from within your data source.
If you have two or more template project files that need to make use of the same data, switch between AE project templates on a per-row basis within the same data source.
Run shell scripts or use the Templater API to create and run ExtendScripts. These scripts listen for events that Templater broadcasts and hook into Templater’s processes allowing you to extend its automation capability.
Engage with Templater processes through shell commands. With the command line interface (CLI), developers have unparalleled flexibility for integrating video versioning within their existing pipelines or systems. Most controls found in the Templater panel are configurable via a command line options file.
The Bot for Templater operates After Effects for you. When The Bot finds new data, it triggers Templater’s customization and rendering process. Developers can create web or mobile apps that feed data into Templater’s data source, offering a collaborative, custom video content creation solution.
Use The Bot for Templater to automatically replicate or render data sets of a significant size.
The nitty
Gritty
The nitty Gritty