How an Excel Spreadsheet Saved Me Hours in After Effects

welcome to story time with sergey that's what i'm gonna call it so back i'm gonna take you way back to 2019 so back in 2019 i was updating these nfl and page promo pieces for fox sports and these things look like this so essentially you'll have something like that so you would say like today today today and then today and then you'll see like the schedule for the day like what's coming up what time and things that nature well you had to create these like a lot every single week and you probably had to create like anywhere from 20 to 40 or something like that i remember it was a big amount and remember this was 2019 mogart's i mean mogus were already here but remember most networks and companies and big companies don't update right away so if let's say it's 2019 it's not uncommon for them to be using something that's like one or two versions behind in some cases even three so 2019 at the time they're probably using after effects 2017 and premiere 2017 and because of that you can't really utilize some of the tools like mongerts and you might be wondering like why do they do that well because it takes a long time to update uh everyone and not only that but with like some plugins and scripts and stuff like that i mean it messes a lot of things up so they usually wait couple years for everyone to catch up to update their tools and their plugins and so that's what a lot of people do so even though it's like 2021 we have image replace feature but a lot of places can't use it until a year or two from now so just something something to uh to think about for sure so i had this thing to create this thing to update and let me show you how painful it was now i already cleaned this up i already know where things are and already rigged things up to where it's responsive but before it wasn't like that it was pretty raw pretty i don't know pretty messy so if you've never worked on it before you had to open this up you had to know where things were so if just to update today you had to find a composition like where is it i think it's this one and then you're like all right well then i think it's that one and no not that one and you kind of had to like spend a whole day just looking for this stuff so today yeah it's this one so you would click on it you would update it in here and then you would have to go back and go to the compositions here and update them in here for every single composition and that's just today right then you had to update the time on both here and here in some cases you have to get rid of this logo in some cases you didn't you had to update every single line up here which was a pain i mean you had to type it in by hand and sometimes you would misspell things because you're too fast and so you had to set things up you had to move things around you had to find this logo replace it for a different one and anyway i'm just trying to paint you like a very painful picture and keep in mind it's something you do constantly and you're getting emotionally and physically tired of this and you're just done with it so it's not uncommon to spend the entire day setting these up just to set them up right so if you had to do like 20 or 30 of them i mean you constantly have to do this look at your sheet and make sure you're spelling everything right make sure it's the right lineup and even after you set it up right then like you would queue it up you would render it overnight come back the next day and then maybe some renders gave out on you maybe you made some errors and you had to redo some stuff anyway yeah it can it can mess you up it can take a long time so naturally i would go like hey let's let's do a mogurt and that's what i would do today like in fact i already created a motor let me show you so i'll just drag it in like this boom now it's a mogurt and i can easily update these on the fly i can just hand this off to an editor and not even bother updating it i'm like hey here's a template you add whatever you want to it i'm done so that's what i would do today right let me show you what the smoker does now actually so we have the position x and y you can kind of adjust things if you want now it's already responsive it will adjust itself automatically but you can adjust this on the fly if you want so that option is definitely there then you would go and choose like a network do you want it to be nfl and fox or do you want to be like online like maybe it's only going to be available on online or something like that so you can quickly pick between these two now then the next sunday instead of that maybe you want to say today so you can just type today look how easy it is just change it and it changes it here it changes it in here as well so let me preview this yeah i mean it's so easy i mean no more clicking through compositions and getting lost yeah no more of that so then you would update the time you like all right maybe it's at 7 30. so you type 7 30 and if i click away you can see it updates it maybe it's uh somewhere else maybe like it's an atlantic standard time it would do that i mean you can pick any kind of time zone you can think of and it will automatically adjust it which is awesome and again this way it avoids like you can sometimes you can't remember like what's how do you what kind of time zone it is is it three letters two letters so you can easily just pick one and there you go then changing the teams let me show you how easy that is so you go in here and you have the lineup so one two three you can see that based on here and you have the lineup so let's say maybe instead of i think it's five right now maybe you want to have three teams so you don't have to like deleting stuff and moving things around now you just say hey this one none none and then boom it adjusts itself then again you say none for that as well and so now you have three right awesome then you can say you can easily pick any kind of teams you want you don't have to type it in you don't have to misspell things i mean it's already decided for you you can update any kind of team you can even scroll on them do it quickly and if you need to add like a fourth lineup you can just quickly go over here and set it to any team you want and it will automatically adjust everything super handy then you would move on to the next one you're like all right i got that done so we have the america's game of the week maybe you don't want that option sometimes they don't have that for that week so then you can just turn it off the logo goes away the lineup goes away and you're done right now you can turn it on anytime you can adjust the time maybe you can say 8 30 and then whatever you type in here boom 8 30 and you can also adjust the time zone and again very handy it's way more enjoyable you can go over here and adjust the lineups let's go over here you can say maybe america's game of the week you can just pick between any team you want it will adjust it you can scroll on the mouse anyway you can do all kinds of stuff maybe you want to have two games in here so you can again do the same thing turn it off set it to none to for both and there you go everything's adjusted everything is perfect yeah if it was only that easy but at the time remember it was 2019 we're two versions behind i had to do something different so i try to do this let me show you this now so we're going to go back to after effects and no actually let's go to excel so in the excel i created an excel sheet and it's the same concept as what i showed you in the mogurt so each line of text actually represents a specific render like each project right so the first here column represents whether or not you want to render it so if you say ready then it's going to render whatever changes you make in here now if you don't want it to render you just say done and then it's going to ignore it okay so i'm going to say ready then what would be the name of my video file then you can call it whatever i'm going to call week one that's fine then remember that text you would say something like tonight maybe instead of today you can choose a different logo you can adjust the time you name it you can adjust all of these lineups but you have to do it in here so you can go over here adjust all the lineups if you set it to none it's going to ignore it you get the idea so it's the same thing what we were doing in a mowgrd but just in one line in a spreadsheet now why is this helpful well keep in mind what if you had 20 of these so you would just copy this and just paste them like that right all day long you can quickly create like 10 of them on the fly like on the fly and based on how many you have how many lines of text you have that's how many renders it's going to queue it up so let's let's not do this many let's only do like three i'm gonna delete these so let's delete all right so we have three things so maybe the second video i'm gonna call it week two and then week three right instead of tonight i'm going to change it just so you know that it's working i'm going to say tomorrow and then this one's going to be today all right and then like maybe change different apps maybe nfl for two and let's just say nine o'clock for these let's do nine nine not sure why it's setting i think you have to actually say nine o'clock let's do that there you go i'm going to copy this paste it all right you get the idea so you can easily do this and so now all you need to do just make all the changes let's do just the first one right here for today i'm going to do let's do chiefs versus bills all right so you make all the changes you can have all of them queued up you're good to go let's do one more actually i'm gonna copy this and paste it and i'm gonna say done just to show you that uh if you set it to done it's not going to render it so now we have four files queued up but one of them is not going to be rendered so technically we're going to have three of them rendered so at this point you just save it you go over here you know you go to file and then save as in here you would navigate to a folder i already have everything set up and i want to do it as a csv file so you go over here csv file save it and yeah i want to overwrite it alright we're good so after you've done that then you would go to after effects and then you would navigate you know let's say you just open it you have a new project right so you just open it watch what happens when you run the script that i created for it so you would go to nfl on air and page when you click on it it will automatically load the project and load this menu right here so in here you would load the csv file basically the file we just exported out of the excel so you just load it up and you would navigate over to it we're going to go to i believe it's in here documents and there it is so we're gonna open it up boom it's queued up it's ready to go then we're gonna say where do we want to render it so we're gonna say load let's render it to i have this folder right here press okay and then you would say render settings you would adjust what you want here what kind of output module basically which codec you would have like your own codecs so we do we're going to do something like this you can create your own presets it has to do based on what you already have installed on your computer and then watch how easy it is you just press render and it's going to cue it up it's going to render one by one it's going to open up make all the changes from that csv file it's going to render it now it doesn't get hung up here a bit done then it's going to go to the second one do the same thing and remember we only have three even though we had four but three are only going to be rendering so we should have three different files so that's on the third one right now and let's see it it should be done so once it's done it's gonna close the project it's gonna i mean basically that's it you don't have anything else open so at that point you would just find your project that you rendered it to and here we have them all queued up so as you can see we have a final report and we have all of them in here so let's see week one let's see what it says tonight it made all the changes we needed to we can click on week two it says tomorrow it did all the changes week three today makes everything you need to do and then like watch this if i go back to excel and those were already rendered so if i go over here and hit refresh it's going to tell me that it's all done so you can queue them all up you can refresh and see which ones are being done so you can if you're a project manager this could be super helpful and if you need to re-render something you just set it to ready and then make all the changes and then do the same process again export it as csv and you're done all right well that's the end of this video that's how i was able to use just a simple excel spreadsheet to speed up the workflow speed up the time and trust me it's so much quicker than going into after effects or doing it by hand but if you have if you take the time and set it up right it can save you a lot of time and again it's just a spreadsheet everything is right there and you don't even need to know how to use after effects so definitely something to think about well thank you for watching my name is sergey praknevsky and if you're not a part of our mentoring group on facebook you're missing out because it's an awesome group it's totally free you just join it's a private group and we have some heavyweights of this industry rubbing shoulders with everybody and they're eager to either learn or teach someone something so again it's a group that was created to help people so if you want to be helped then you join if you want to help somebody else you join or if you want to do both then you join as well so definitely join by going to ucrme.com community and if you want to support what we do here uh check out our tools our courses at ucrmedia.com but until next time my name is sergey praknevsky and this is euchremedia.com [Music] you

Channel: ukramedia

Views: 12,516

Keywords: ukramedia, adobe after effects, mogrts, mogrt, excel, spreadsheet, script, aescript, expressions, sergei, prokhnevskiy, ukramedia.com, video tutorial, video lesson, saving time, batch render, render time, render speed

Id: Ov4Zd-Mgmbo

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021