• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  getting AE to display data in near real-time

  Posted by David Kaplan on April 24, 2009 at 9:43 pm

  Hi,

  Hope this question doesn’t stump everyone. Basically, my company wants to use Datamator or a similar product to display graphs and charts but do it in near real-time. Like every 5 minutes or so, the data would be written to a tab-deliminated file via Excel or a web page… then AE would pick up that file (via Datamator), render the charts, then display the chart on a monitor.

  Is this possible? I’ve googled the hell out of it and haven’t found anything that would work.

  Feel free to email me directly if you wish.

  Thanks!

  David

  Maxi Gomez replied 16 years, 7 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  April 25, 2009 at 1:32 am

  I’m not familiar with Datamator. How does it load the data initially? I suspect you won’t be able to trigger that action with a script.

  Dan
• 

  David Kaplan

  April 27, 2009 at 12:05 pm

  Datamator seems to just call a text file with the data in it. What I need to know is is there a way to a) get AE to render then play (full screen without the AE user interface) and b) automatically render a new animation every 5 minutes.

  Am I asking too much from AE?

  David
• 

  John Montgomery

  April 28, 2009 at 8:16 pm

  I’d think it’s possible, although complex because you’d essentially have to use a stand-alone machine and screen-script the generation process if the plugin will pull in new data each render without you touching it, then you’d have to use another machine to queue and play the rendered video only once it completed. To manage open files, you’d have to write some sort of queue-ing agent that would watch for new files in the output folder, but also monitor the file handle to ensure it’s closed before moving it over to the new machine, then have something on the new machine that was smart enough to queue up the new file in your playlist, and remove the previous version because you won’t be able to replace it while it’s playing.
• 

  Maxi Gomez

  February 4, 2010 at 3:47 pm

  John, Fist of all thanks for take a look to my demo reel.
  I know what you mean about the Andrew’s technique.
  I’m prepearing my new reel but I don’t have much time now to finish it.
  Soon I will upload the new one, I hope you can take some time to watch it again.

  Thank you very much for your comment.

  Best regards.

  Maxi Gomez
  https://www.maxigomez.com

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