Busy Editors: Spawn 100’s of Videos From Your AE Template with a Click Through Plainly

Automate the repetitive side of video creation, and focus on productivity instead.

Need to generate hundreds of slightly different videos within a short timeframe?

Are you responsible for on-demand graphics that can change at a moment’s notice? Wish you could generate personalized videos for clients around the world by entering a few key details into a spreadsheet?

Plainly SAAS platform takes the monotony out of mass video creation. Plainly provides the connection and power to leverage your AE template, any data source, and a simple to use API to automatically trigger the cloud rendering of 100’s, even 1000’s of videos while you focus on other tasks.

Plainly’s Simple Process for Automatic Video Creation

Plainly’s video automation ensures that through a simple set of steps you will save hours of work.

Once an Adobe After Effects template is created or procured, determine which dynamic elements that will be changed repeatedly in upcoming videos.

In this case, we’d like to automatically release sports update videos for games played in cities across the USA. Within our Adobe After Effects template, we will need to change the location of the sporting event (Text1), the first team’s logo (Logo 1), the first team’s name and score (Text 2), the second team’s logo (Logo 2), the second team’s name and score (Text 3), and the placement the game series (Text 4).

Once your files and fonts within your project are ready, a ZIP file is created and uploaded in the Plainly dashboard, where Plainly analyzes each layer of the project into a list. On this list, you will designate each dynamic element of the project, corresponding to the headers that you will enter into your spreadsheet.

Next, assemble a spreadsheet, either in Google Sheets or on airtable.com, with headers that will correspond to your dynamic fields on the After Effects template.

Set up the API between your Spreadsheet and Plainly using Zapier, Make, or your own custom API. Next, watch Plainly automatically change the dynamic fields of your template, render your video in the cloud, and insert the storage location of your videos back into the spreadsheet in moments.

Whenever a new game-score video needs to be generated, the information can be entered into the individual columns of your spreadsheet, and Plainly will trigger the new video to be rendered and placed back into the “Video Link” column of the spreadsheet, ready for use.

The information to trigger the creation of new videos can be entered remotely from any device, and the user does not even have to open After Effects to render videos from this template!

Hundreds or thousands of videos can be generated in this manner with a simple spreadsheet that is updated from yourself, your team, or even by a random participant via a simple contact form on your website.

If outside information is being added from multiple sources at random times, Plainly can be set to scan the spreadsheet for new information once every five minutes, and automatically generate new videos with the new information like clockwork.

Event-Based Workflows

A more demanding level of video generation involves creating videos with information that changes on a minutely basis.

If a large publisher faces the upcoming football World Cup in Qatar, during which they will need to create videos based on events, Plainly offers the perfect platform to cut their work down to minutes.

Whenever a goal, substitution, or line-up change happens, this publisher will need to generate a video containing live data to be published on social media and their website. This complex workflow means they will be tying different API’s together and creating a dynamic workflow that will trigger based on events.

With Plainly, the publisher can have each World Cup event video ready to use within seconds. Even a single user watching the game in the stands can feed the score data in from a smartphone and, with a single click, the Plainly software will render the new videos in the cloud, and upload the new video storage locations back into the original spreadsheet ready for publishing.

In fact, in workflows like these, after the initial setup, it is possible to make these videos without any humans at all! Data does not even need to typed into spreadsheets. If the score data is fed into Plainly’s API from an external API, Plainly can send the resulting videos directly to this publisher’s CMS.

Choose a Plan that Fits Your Workflow Complexity

The Plainly pricing model is flexible, based on rendered video time needed per month on each tier. Plainly’s video retention times designate how long the generated video links stay live in the cloud before transferring to the intended locations, and are generously allotted for each level of usage.

Even if you struggle with After Effects template creation or API connections, Plainly can help you create 100’s to 1000’s of videos on demand by offering various levels of support, specific to the technological area you feel weakest.

More information and a personal 15-minute demo can be found at Plainly’s website.