Build a Render-Bot in After Effects

hello Joey here and in this video I'm going to show you how to automate After Effects we're gonna walk through a few different ways of doing this including building templates that other human beings can use to save you time and we're also going to build a completely autonomous render robot using template err from data clay which is a very cool plugin you are going to love there is a lot G impact into this video you're gonna learn a ton so let's roll those credits now automation is all about saving you time you're the after-effects artist you're the one with the expertise and it sure would be nice if you could spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time doing creative stuff so the first thing we're gonna do is use a really cool feature of After Effects and Adobe Premiere to build a template so that someone who doesn't know After Effects can still use your graphics and kick out as many versions as they need so let's hop into After Effects and take a look so we're gonna start with a simple example and this is a lower third that I have built for a show about birds it is pretty amazing good sound effect and everything so imagine that you're the after-effects artist for this show and you've designed this lower third and now a lot of your job is going to be doing versions of this lower third you know there could be a dozen two dozen of these per episode and really it's just a repetitive task changing the name changing the title and rendering out another version and then of course at the last minute something changes so we are gonna make it so that anybody an editor assistant editor anyone who can open up Adobe Premiere is going to be able to use this template and change it so the first thing we need to do is figure out what do we need to give the editor or the producer control over so obviously the name of the guest and the title of the guest those are the two things that are going to change everything else will stay the same so we're gonna use a really cool feature called the essential graphics panel you can find that in the window menu essential graphics and it will open up a panel that looks like this now the first thing you need to do is to tell this panel which comp you actually want to build controls for so in this case we're going to set the master comp to lower third that's this this comp right here and this area here this is where we're basically just gonna build a control panel and we're only gonna put in controls for the things we need we're gonna take all of the complexity of After Effects out of the equation so let's start with the guests name so if we come down here to the name type layer and I hit you you this will bring up any properties that have been changed from the default it's just a shortcut to get me to this source text property that's the one that I want to give someone control over and it's as easy as clicking and dragging to the essential graphics panel letting go and now we have a control now I can rename this control into something like guest name and now you'll see that this is actually linked to that type layer so if I change it from buck McFate goal to something like Doc McDuck's teen or something you'll see that it automatically updates in the template alright then I'm also going to need to put controls in for the title of the guest so that's line one and line two there's two type layers here so let me first come in and grab the source text for line one now this little message that's popping up is giving me a warning it's saying that there's an expression on this property I just dragged in I'm gonna tell you why in a minute but basically After Effects is just warning me that you know this could create some wonky behavior if you're not aware that there is an expression on the property I'm just gonna say okay and I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna name this line oh one then I'm gonna come down and I'm gonna do the same thing with line two and now we're good to go now I want to point out a couple of things first of all you'll notice that I was pretty sloppy with the upper and lower casing of these descriptions yet over here everything shows up all caps so that's done in a really really easy way if I select say a line one and I come over here to my character panel you'll see that this option here is selected that's the all-caps property and if you turn that on on a type layer then it will automatically transform whatever you type into all caps and that way you don't have to sort of remind the editor hey it's supposed to be all caps it just automatically does it alright you want to take bad taste out of the equation so there's a couple of things I want to show you so first of all sometimes this is a two line descriptor of the guest but sometimes it's a one line descriptor and if I removed a line - if I just turn it off this is gonna be out of balance it's not gonna look right anymore so things kind of need to adjust if there's one line or two line so watch this if I go to line two and I just erase it you see how this automatically updated and moved position and this little bar got a little thinner so that's being done with some expressions now this is not an expressions tutorial so I'm just gonna gloss over these really quickly but you can actually download this project file open it up and dissect the expressions yourself if you're curious all you have to do is go to school motion comm and sign up for a free student account and you can download this project file and hundreds of other cool assets so you should do that and we also have some free video tutorials on expressions to teach you how to get started using these alright so the way that this is rigged up is that there's actually two versions of this bottom orange panel there's a small panel that shows up if there's one line of type and then there's a different copy of it that shows up if there's two lines of type and all that's changing is the opacity so you can see that right now because there's only one line the opacity of the one line panel set to 100% and the opacity of the two line panel is zero the moment I change line two to something else such as dentist - the flamingo's you'll see that now the two line panels opacity is set to 100% there's some simple expressions driving that it's basically just looking to see if there is anything in the source text of line two and if there's not then it sets the opacity to zero and if there is it sets of to 100 we have a similar expression on this one line version and there's a couple of other things going on that I'll point out to you so the point of these expressions by the way is to remove the complexity and and Frank some of the choice from whoever is going to be using this template remember we're trying to automate a repetitive task and while we're not using a render robot yet we're using other humans to sort of automate a repetitive motion design task it's helpful to do the work of setting up maybe some expressions ahead of time so that whoever then uses the template doesn't have to come ask you how to do something and won't accidentally do something that doesn't look good one of the things I was concerned about was that an assistant editor or an editor might type in a title that is just too long and runs off the edge of this and that would look really bad and even if it just gets too close to the edge it's not gonna look good so I made an expression that essentially acts as a warning and let me show you what that is really quickly so here it is and again you can download this project if you want to use this in your own work and basically it just looks at how many characters the title is and if it's above 40 then it kind of throws this error message and it tells whoever's using this that the max length is 40 characters so let me show you how this works if I come in to line 1 and I come to the end here and I just start adding spaces to it eventually I'm gonna get to 40 characters and it's going to tell me the max length is 40 characters and as soon as I backspace and I go below 40 characters it pops back on so this is just a nice way of ensuring that whoever uses this can't go too far and make one title that's too long and kind of ruins that the beautiful design I've come up with you alright so now we've got this essential graphics panel it's basically impossible to use it in a way that we're not intending if you remove line two it automatically adjusts the template if you type something that's too long it will give you a warning this is wonderful the last thing I want to do is add a little bit of instruction here so one of the cool features of the essential graphics panel is the ability to add a comment to your interface you can also group properties if you have something that's kind of complicated but this is a very simple template so I'm just gonna add a comment I'm gonna rename that comment instructions and then I'm just going to type in make sure line o 2 is empty if you don't need it I'll move this to the top and now we're good to go so now we've got this nice control panel and someone could in theory come into After Effects and just use this to make versions but there's a way better way that's a lot easier for people who don't know After Effects and that is by exporting this template into a format that premier can use so let's do that so I'm just gonna click export motion graphics template I'm gonna save my project I need to tell After Effects where to save this template the template is called a mo Girt file so I'm gonna save it as bird lower third dot mo Girt in a folder with my project in this case I don't need to worry about any of these compatibility check boxes I'm just gonna hit OK and it will export the template cool so now we've built a template we've made a really easy control panel for our lower third which is actually a little bit complicated under the hood with some of those expressions now I'm going to show you how to bring it into premiere so that anybody who can open premiere can easily make lower thirds so let's take a look at this shot which is going to need a lower third now I think as long as that can remember I've always loved African swallows especially unladen once you know their airspeed Vil so first of all this show is going to be amazing when it's done but this shot needs a lower third and it sure would be nice if I didn't have to call up my After Effects genius to make me a lower third so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna import that mo Girt file that we created in the previous step so over here is the essential graphics panel in Premiere and it looks pretty different than the one in After Effects this is sort of a browser that we're looking at here of a bunch of presets that ship with premiere and just kind of scrolling through you can see how many different uses there are for this technique and then once you've opened one up you can actually edit the settings right in Premiere so we need to import our McGirt file so come down here and weigh buried in the corner this tiny little icon almost off my screen that is the button you click to install a new margret file then I'll just navigate to where I saved it there it is bird lower-third mo Gert and just like that I have imported it into premiere and you can actually see it it showed up right down there if you have a lot of these preset and you can't find that you can also use this handy search feature and there it is bird lower-third all right so now the next step is I need to drag this into my timeline now the first time you do this it needs to load that motion graphics template it's almost loading after-effects in the background so that it can use After Effects is rendering engine this can take a minute or two so just be patient all right and here it is in the timeline our bird lower-third and you can see even came in with that beautiful screech sound effect all right so let's just put this on top of our beautiful experts footage here I'm gonna move the audio layer down so that it can be on its own track and I'm gonna move this up and then I'm just gonna move this whole thing and let's figure out where we want it to start maybe you know sort of right about there all right perfect and just like that we have a lower third always loved African swallows especially unladen ones perfect okay now unfortunately my name is not doc mcduck Steen thanks mom so how are we gonna change this type well if you select the lower third the essential graphics panel over here now changes to edit mode and you can see we've got our instructions make sure line two is empty if you don't need it guess name all right so instead of doc McDuck's teen I'm gonna use my bird stage name which is Joseph Birdman and you can see that just like that the name is already updated I am NOT a canary translation specialist unfortunately but I am president of the African swallow Club look at that and that just fit in there too now in addition I also once played a big bird in a play and I think that the audience would like to know that so I'm just gonna type in once played big bird on stage and just like that all of the expressions all of the templating that we did in After Effects you can see now it's paid off because we have this very easy-to-use interface and anybody can be taught in five seconds how to make a copy of a lower third and to select it and to change the name from Joseph Birdman to Guerry featherly right and that's the amazing thing about this is that it literally creates a different instance of the lower third and you can change it and if Gary featherly isn't as interesting as me and only has one line of information that's all updated automatically and just to double check if I tried to make this title too long like in president of the African swallow Club since 1992 well that's too long and now you're getting this little error message okay so this is an amazing way of taking something that's a repetitive kind of boring task just making a million versions of something and offloading it kind of automating it by using human robots people who don't know After Effects as well as you so this is really just scratching the surface of what the essential graphics panel can do and if you want to go even deeper and learn more about it we have another video on the subject at school emotion calm and on our YouTube channel and we will link to that in the description now there is a small downside to this which is that whoever's going to be making these lower thirds still needs access to premier now there's another way to do this using a really cool third-party tool called template err and I'm going to show you that next and you're gonna see how we can make this even easier and more automatic all right I bet you didn't think you'd be looking at a spreadsheet in this video on a motion design channel so here's why we're in Google sheets the first thing we need to do for this second technique of automation is create a list of all of the lower thirds that we need and so a Google sheets just the most obvious way to do that I've got a column for the name of the the guest line one line two and then I have these columns here and I'm explaining what those are so let's start by making me a nice lower third alright so you've got Joey corn Minh and I am a lover of birds I am also a an Eagle enthusiast okay now you'll notice that as soon as I hit return this number jumped to 33 and it remained green this is counting the number of letters in line one and you know just like After Effects has expressions spreadsheets have expressions and by the way I should say that I don't know all of these off the top of my head I just googled them same as everybody but what happens if I try it to add a little little extra what if I also said makes great omelettes ah now I've breached that 40 character limit and you can see that it's turned red its alerted me so this is important because what we're gonna do is we're basically going to take this spreadsheet and feed it to after-effects like a meal and it's going to ingest it and spit out all the renders we need so I need to make sure that whoever is filling this out doesn't accidentally make something that's too long and so I added a little bit of conditional formatting here and I'm not gonna go too deep down that rabbit hole but if you want to you can Google conditional formatting and basically it just makes a rule if this number is greater than 40 turn it read basically how it works all right so here's a sheet already filled out with a whole bunch of lower thirds on it now if somebody had to go through and actually type all of these out in after-effects and set up the render queue and do all that it would kind of be annoying but of course there is a better way now if you want to follow along with the next part of this tutorial you are going to need template err from data claim now I have to say it ain't cheap it's super duper powerful though and so if you're running a studio or if you do this kind of thing a lot it's going to pay for itself very quickly but you can go to data clay comm you can actually download a trial version of one of the versions of template er you can find out all the information in there and we will link to that in the description for this video all right here we go so back in After Effects I'm gonna go up to window and I'm going to open the template err to script now when you install template err it's going to install a script which is the interface to use the tool and it's also going to install an effect called template settings and we'll talk about that in a minute so the way template ER works is you feed it a data source like a Google sheet and then it will apply the information in that data source to various layers in various ways that you can define so first we need to link up our data source template err can take a lot of different of data you can actually do some really really fancy stuff with it if you have a software developer handy but I don't so I'm just gonna use the Google integration which is really really simple now the first time you do this it's gonna ask you to sign in to your Google account so you will need a Google account in order to do this and then it's gonna pull up every Google sheet that it finds in your account so here is that bird lower thirds sheet we were just looking at and I'm gonna grab the episode 1 sheet in there and I'm gonna say ok so now it is dynamically connected to that sheet cool what good does that do us well what we need to do is we need to tell aftereffects which of these layers are going to be affected by this data so the way you do that is you figure out for example which type layer needs to be dynamically updated and let's just start with the name type layer and I'm going to apply the data clay template or settings effect to it now this effect has a whole bunch of settings in it we're gonna get into a few of them in this tutorial but for now we don't actually have to do anything one of the things this effect does is it literally just tells template ER that this layer is supposed to be pulling data from the Google sheet so you'll notice that the layer name is named with an uppercase n line one with an uppercase L line two of the number K cell if we go back to our Google sheet you'll notice that I have named these column headers exactly the same as I named my layers and after-effects and that's very important you need to match the spelling and you need to match the case exactly because once we start running template ER it's going to look for the header in the first row of your spreadsheet and then it will start cycling through all of the cells so looking at this I see that we have information in rows 2 through 27 so let's go back to After Effects and go back to our template or to settings I'm going to set the render row to be 2 through 27 now I also need to apply that same effect to line 1 in line to the template or settings effect so what I'm going to do is go to name I'm gonna grab template or settings and just copy it and paste it onto these two alright and now we are ready to go now to make sure that this actually works what I can now do is push the preview button and there's a few settings I want to point out so first of all I have my render row set to 2 through 27 it's important that you set this range correctly so that template irnos where the data is that you're looking for this is also an important setting preview uses next row when I hit preview it's going to pull data from the sheet and it can do that in a few different ways you can have it pull randomly next row previous row right now I have it set to next row and if I just click this preview button you can see automatically it pulled in the first piece of data Joey Korman Eagle enthusiast slash dog-walker now if I hit preview again it goes to the next row on the spreadsheet and it populates the lower third with that data if I hit psycho previews it will just keep pulling rows and this is kind of a cool way to just you know sit here for a minute and just do a quick double check and make sure that everything's working the way it's supposed to that everything looks right and you can see because we put in the time ahead of time to do some expressions so this all gets updated dynamically we're good to go so everything is working exactly the way I want it to and now we can actually send these to the render queue so how do we do that first let's go into the Preferences and take a look at a couple of things here so in template or preferences there's a few things I want to point out so the first is the target composition and if you don't have this set correctly if it's not actually telling template or the right cop then when you hit preview you won't get the behavior you're expecting so make sure that your target composition is set to the comp you actually care about so lower third template er these bot settings we're gonna get into in the next section but over here this is really important this replication section so in template err once you have your template set up the way that you want you have a couple of options you can actually render all 26 of these versions of the lower third or you can replicate them which basically just makes a new comp for each one and can add them to the render queue it can even send them to Adobe Media encoder so I don't want to do that I do want to add them to the render queue and I think that's it so I'm gonna hit OK and now I'm just gonna hit replicate so I just hit replicate and as you can see template ER is going through that Google sheet and making a new After Effects comp for every single row and it's pulling the name line 1 line 2 it's updating each comp dynamically and it's doing it all while I sit here talking to you which is amazing all right and it's almost done and just like that we have 26 comps and just just to double check let's go into one of these and take a look and there you go Andrew Kramer cooker of pies and cakes god bless so it also added these to the render queue and you'll notice that the output module is set to AI F 48k and that is because I forgot to change these render options so if you hit refresh template er will load in every output module that you have set up in After Effects and then you can choose that as an output so if for example I wanted to do lossless with alpha or ProRes for 4 for 4 so that I can have an alpha channel because I will need an alpha or a tiff sequence with alpha you can set that here and then when you replicate and and add things to the render queue they'll be added with those settings alright so now we could just hit render I also could have just hit render and it would have done the same thing but then taking the additional step of rendering all of them which is also very handy all right so now you've seen two ways to automate repetitive tasks both ways do require a little bit of involvement but obviously doing it this way is a lot easier and faster for you the after effects artist then having to type all 26 versions of this lower-third out by hand the next example is going to use the bot feature of template err and this is where it's going to blow your mind so here's a nice little cute spooky animation maybe I don't know it's for Halloween or something so imagine that you have a client that wants you to kick out you know hundreds of this basically with different people's names on their different dates maybe randomize the little kind of Disneyworld esque you know rhymes that are at the bottom so this would be the exact kind of thing that template is perfect for because not only do you have information that needs to be updated the person's name but there's also some design rules some layout rules here that need to be followed if you have someone's name who's much longer than Jeff gut the problem is it's going to make the vertical size of this type layer a lot smaller and then the spacing is gonna get thrown off and you don't want to have to manually go in and adjust layers every single time so of course there's a better way so here's what we're gonna do I've already got this comp set up so let me walk you through the setup of it okay so there is a name layer here right so this Jeff gut layer that's just a type layer I don't have the template or effect on there yet then there's a layer called full dates okay so this layer here full dates is actually being built dynamically through an expression which I will show you so what this expression is doing is it's referencing to other type layers and then it's taking the type from those layers adding a little dash in between them and combining them together okay so I have these two guide layers down here at the bottom death date and birth date and these are dates that I would like to pull in from a Google sheet and then I just combine them using this full date type layer there okay so these are actually the layers that will need that template or setting effect but this layer is going to reference it's kind of kind of a clever way of doing it all right and then the final thing is the actual poem right that sort of tells you how this person died and those live in this pre comp here Co D which stands for cause of death it's kind of morbid if we check that out you'll see that I basically have a few different poems here and they're all exactly one frame long and what I'm doing is I have an expression on time remap that is basically choosing a and frame between zero and four because that's that's how After Effects works it's not between frame 1 and frame 5 its frame zero and frame four and again you can download this project and dissect these expressions if you want to once you have your free school motion student account the link will be in the description and it's basing the random frame it chooses off of the length of the person's name and that's important because everybody's name will be you know a different length most people's names will be different from one another and so that just sort of as ensures that Jeff guts cause of death will be different than Jeffery gutenberg and Steen's right so now just like before we've got some expressions sort of helping us out doing some automation but now we need to get the data in here automatically and to show you how that's gonna work we're actually gonna go on to the Internet now what I'm about to show you is built just using off-the-shelf software there's nothing custom about the tools I'm about to use but you should know that template ER is very very powerful and so if you have a software developer that you know or you work at a larger company that might have software engineers they can actually program things to plug in to template ER and do way more advanced things that I'm even going to show you and I'm going to talk about some of those at the end of the video but all I want you to keep in mind is that you can go do this right now as long as you have template er so the first tool I want to use is type form now type form is just a very simple web app that lets you make forms and publish them and you know let users give you input so I have built a simple form here called death day alright and here's how it works I'm also pretending that it's sponsored by a company because honestly I think that there is a business model that someone watching this video can utilize this is a new way of using motion design as a business and I want you to keep that in mind so it starts off with a little landing page then it asks you your name then it asks you your birth date and then it says click the button to head to death bot 3000 or 30 thousand and one death bot 3000 wasn't available when I made this tutorial I'm sorry so death bought 30 thousand and one on Twitter and in a few moments you'll see your tombstone appear if you click this it will take you to a Twitter page and there are actually no tweets here so what I would like to do is send people to this forum they fill out the form and then a few minutes later an animation with their name and their birth and death date on a tombstone shows up here on Twitter and we are gonna do that right now okay so this type forum is actually connected to a Google sheet it's really really easy and a lot of apps can do this not just type form there are other forum software's that do the same thing but I've connected it to a Google sheet okay so here is that Google sheet it is called the death day sheet now here's what happens when you connect a Google sheet to type form it will automatically create columns for all the questions that you're asking and it will also tell you when the form gets submitted and it gives you this weird token so let's just demonstrate that so you can see how it works so if we go to the type form and I type in my name my birth date I kid you not is April 1st and that's it now watch this if I go over to the sheet that quickly it's already put that information on the Google sheet so hopefully you're already starting to see how this can be used automatically with template er now here's a problem I want to be able to change what this is called so that it's a shorter name with no spaces it'll just work better for the layer name and after effects and remember the layer name has to match this for template or to work I also I'm gonna need to calculate a death date when you use type form and you connect it to a Google sheet you cannot change this Google sheet at all or it will break and stop working so what I did was I made another sheet in the same spreadsheet just another page basically and I used a little expression here inside of Google sheets so basically every cell references that exact same cell from the previous sheet from death date okay it's a way of cleaning the data so there's a few little expressions in here and I'm not sure that that's the right term maybe formula is what you call it in Google sheets but from this birth date of April 1st 1981 I am calculating aid date and the way of doing that is just by adding today's dates to a random number between somewhere 10 years from now or 50 years from now okay and again I didn't know how to do this off the top my head I had to google it and that's the beauty of the internet okay so birth date death date now what is this what's this render status so this column is something that template err will be expecting to see as soon as I turn on the template or bot it will look for a column with the header render status and then it will look for the word ready if the word ready is there and the bot is running then it will grab this data and it will trigger whatever action I have sent so either rendering this out or adding it to a queue okay so I obviously don't want the word ready to show up until there's actual data here so I used a little formula I guess to basically check to see if the name cell is blank and if it is this should be blank too but as soon as there's a name there set that to ready and the last thing I want you to notice is that I have named these columns differently name birthdate and death date all right so now back to After Effects so the first thing I'm going to do is apply the template or effect to all of the type layers that need it okay so let me go to name and I will add the data clay template er settings and then I can just copy that I'm gonna paste it to death date and birth date and there's some other layers I'm gonna need to copy this too even though they are not going to change dynamically the way a type layer does okay so uh well we'll get to that in a minute but first let's just wire this thing up so I need to go to template er and then need to choose a different data source now currently there's only data in the second row so I'm just gonna set this to render row 2 through 2 and then I'm gonna hit preview and see what happens all right here is the problem people so my name is a lot longer than Jeff got and it's running off the tombstone and that is indeed a problem so there's an easy fix for that using template or which is really cool so if I go to the name layer and I look at the template or settings effect there is a layout group and inside of there there's an option called scale factor currently set to 0% now to show you exactly what this does I'm going to need to add one more to my spreadsheet so let's just go do that all right and let's pick somebody with a very short name much shorter than Joey Korman and let's I don't know how old Chris is but let's just pretend that it's May 12th and he was born in 1850s very old okay so now we have Christo on the spreadsheet we've Joey cornermen and Christo different length names all right so now I need to tell template or to render row two through three and then if I hit preview there we go Christo all right so what I need to do is first scale this name up to the correct width all right so let's say that we want all of the names to be this wide okay and don't worry that it's too close to the rest in peace' we're gonna fix that in a minute too so what I can now do is go into the template or settings effect and turn the scale factor up to 100 now watch what happens when I hit preview it has maintained the width of the type element by shrinking the type okay it's pretty slick now we still have the problem of the spacing between rest and peace and the name keeps changing and I want it to look well-designed this is too much space okay so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna go back into the effect controls and we're going to use the attachment property and what we're gonna do is attach this type layer name to another layer and I'm going to attach it to the layer rest in peace and I want to attach on the bottom edge and there's a padding setting but I don't know exactly how much I'm gonna need yet okay so to make this a little easier I'm gonna tear off the effect controls and put them here all right so if I hit preview you'll see that now my name is right underneath rest in peace and if I hit preview again christow is right under there cool so I want some padding there so if I change this number attach padding to say ten and then I hit preview again you'll see that now there's a little bit of padding there so how much padding do I want well I could just keep adjusting this and hitting preview or I could do this hit cycle previews and while it's cycling I can just sort of nudge these up with my arrow keys wait a second see it see what changes that's too much yeah I think that's good 20 is about right perfect alright so that is done so now you can see how you can actually attach type to other layers and it will maintain the spacing and it will maintain the size automatically it's an incredible feature of template er all right so let's set the rest of this up so now I want to do the same thing for the date on the tombstone I want it to always have the same amount of spacing if I go to that layer there is no template or settings effect on it because this layer remember is actually being created by an expression not by template err so what I can do though is apply the template or settings effect and even though there is no column in my Google sheet called full dates I can still use the layout options specifically the attachment I can attach this to the name layer and I can attach on the bottom edge and I know I'm going to need padding here so I'm gonna cycle a preview and while it's cycling I'm just gonna start adding padding until I get what I want all right and then I'll stop cycling and we're good to go then I need to do the same thing for this poem so we'll go to cause of death layer I'll apply the template or settings effect I'll attach it to the full date on the bottom and there will need to be padding and I can actually just use the same padding value from this which was 90 right and just to check it let me preview this aha that did not work as I expected and the reason is there is actually if you look at this pre comp here you can see that there's a lot of room on top of the comp it's empty and template is counting that and so I actually need the padding to be a different number so I'm going to cycle the preview and this padding may actually need to be negative number which is another thing you can do all right so now I'm just eyeballing it every time it changes and there we go just like that alright so we've connected the Google sheet to After Effects this comp is pulling data from that sheet and changing the name changing the birth date changing the death date all dynamically and that data is actually coming from a type form a web form that you can literally access on your cell phone which is really cool so the next step is we are going to turn on the template or bot and we're going to tell it to keep an eye on that Google sheet and kick out renders every time there's a new input so before we enable the bot what I'd like to do is go into preferences and set a few things now keep in mind that the end goal here is to have these render out and end up on Twitter without us doing anything and to do that we're gonna use a feature of Adobe Media encoder so for replication what I'm gonna want is to send replicates to Adobe Media encoder so by checking this template or not only creates a new comp for every version of this animation it actually saves each of those comps in a separate After Effects project file that's gonna be useful because we're gonna set up a watch folder which you will see in a minute so now let's take a look at the bot settings so there's two actions that the bot can take it can actually just render straight out of After Effects when a new version is detected or it can replicate using these settings over here so by having replicate turned on when template detects a new row in that Google sheet it will create an entirely new After Effects project with the correct animation in there and it will save it where I tell it the bot name is not important in this example and this is probably a good time to point out that data clay has really good documentation on this tool so if you're interested in this go to their website and read through it you'll be able to find out really quickly what all of these settings are for this one's important how many minutes should we wait before checking for data in a Google sheet now I put one in there but it's telling me that it's actually going to wait three minutes between checks because of a Google sheets API limitation that's not data Clay's doing that's Google saying you have to wait three minutes between checks and everything else is set the way we want I want to make sure that my target composition is set to graveyard start now we need to set the output folder this is really important so let's go here and what I want to do is go into the folder for this tutorial make a new folder and I'm going to call this render watch and you will see why in a minute now I need to set the render option so I'm gonna change the output to something else and in this case it's not really going to matter because I'm actually going to be using Adobe Media encoder to set the render settings for this so I'm just gonna pick lossless doesn't really matter I don't have to worry about the renderer setting because the bot is actually going to be looking for new rows and that's how it's gonna know what to render and what to replicate and then I'm going to enable the bot and now you can see it has detected the change it's replicating and it's done well that was easy the end result of what we just saw is that now in that render watch folder there are two After Effects project files the names don't really tell you much but inside of each one is a version of this animation the Joey Corman version and the Chris Doe version okay cool so what's the next step so here's Adobe Media encoder and what we're gonna do is set up a watch folder okay now a watch folder is just a folder on your hard drive that while media encoder is running gets monitored and if it detects new files in there it will automatically import them render them and do anything else that you tell it to do so I'm gonna add a watch folder and the folder that I want to add is this render watch folder okay so I'll choose that and now it is watching that folder and what I want to do is tell it what settings to use for rendering and where to put the output and all of that good stuff so the first thing I want to do is check this make sure that the format's correct and h.264 is perfect because this is going to go on Twitter then we want to tell it what preset to use and you can see I've already got a couple set up here so I created one called death BOTS Twitter 640 by 640 and if I click on this you'll see the properties that I've set up for it okay so in terms of video I have it set to 640 by 640 30 frames per second hardware encoding all that good stuff audio there actually is no audio so this isn't really important at all now the big setting that we are concerned with is this publish setting what's really cool about media encoder is that you can tell it to publish automatically to a whole bunch of different services whatever it just rendered so it's of course got all the Adobe's stuff but then you can also do Facebook YouTube and even Twitter now in order to use this you have to sign in and authorize Adobe Media encoder to be able to use your Twitter account so I've already done that and it's using my death bot 30,000 and one account you can even set the status that it will include when it uploads the video and you can tell it to delete the local file after upload which is good if you're concerned about harddrive space all right so I'm gonna hit ok on this so the preset I want to use is this death bot Twitter 1 okay now it's going to automatically put the outputs in that render watch folder in a subfolder called output and that's it now if we go back to the queue you just need to make sure that auto encode watch folders is turned on and then you're good to go alright so let's do a quick recap we have a type form that asks you for your name and I have the animators survival kit right in front of me so let's just say Richard Williams birthday let's use my birthdate this form then connects to a Google sheet that will take that date calculate a death date from it and set the render column status to ready we have a template or inside of After Effects running a bot that every three minutes checks the Google sheet to see if anything has changed and if so it will kick out a new version save an After Effects project file into our watch folder as soon as that's done Adobe Media encoder will queue it up and you can even see down here in the preview that it is the new name Richard Williams with a birthday and a death date now the magic will be can it upload it to Twitter automatically for us oh my goodness there it is on Twitter that is pretty cool isn't it and there you go now it's definitely cool what we just did but that's not the important thing the important thing to me is that this is an entirely new business model this is now a service that you can offer your clients you can literally build them a little Twitter bot just like this one using off-the-shelf software like template ER and there are companies out there already doing this mo share is a subsidiary of cub studio based out of London they are using template or to do some amazing stuff and algo is a company connected to ello in Italy and they're not using template ER as far as I know but they have their own version of a piece of software like this that is automating things for their clients and it's basically passive come promotion designers so I hope you learned a ton from this I hope you're excited about the possibilities that template or gives you and hopefully this just got you thinking about how you could use it what you could offer your clients and how you can incorporate this tool into your workflow thank you so much for watching check out all of the show notes in the description on youtube or on school of motion comm and I will definitely see you on the next one thanks again for watching and if you learn something boy would it be nice if you liked the video and subscribe to our Channel and please leave us comments questions and tutorial requests as we are ramping up video production at school of motion also head on over to school of motion comm to grab a free student account which will get you access to hundreds of project files our free path to mograph starter course our motion Mondays newsletter exclusive discounts in lots of other goodies alright time to stop talking

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 23,130

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, Automation, Templater, Templater 2, Dataclay, Mogrt, .mogrt, AE, Robot, Automatic, Auto, Render, Media Encoder, School of Motion, Joey, Korenman, Essential Graphics Panel

Id: uo5k4_vu5Vk

Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018