[Perry Sheppard]

perry.sheppard at gmail.com

[Perry Sheppard]

Filip, can you private message me or email me. For some reason, the email response option fails on my computer. Thanks!

[Perry Sheppard]

Thanks Filip, that gives me a better sense of it.

I’ve been researching FFmpeg (haven’t used it in years), Premiere Extendscript and AE scripting this morning. I know AE isn’t really for editing and it might not be sustainable on an ongoing basis, but it looks like it might be the best option for me for the proof-of-concept.

I’ll take a closer look at that script you provided and see if I can wrap my head around the syntax. I found a couple of reference sites, but still working through it.

[Perry Sheppard]

I want to mention–because this community is so fantastic and I’d hate to leave the impression that I’m trying to get ‘free sub-contractor help’–that I work for a public institution and this is one of two projects I’ve been developing on nights and weekends (this isn’t for a paying client).

The institution isn’t asking for these solutions because they don’t know what’s possible, so I’m trying to provide the proof-of-concepts to help improve our processes and provide better experiences for our community. So, I’ve been, admittedly, outside my coding comfort zone because I’m a solution designer more than an actual developer.

Filip, you Tomas (and others) have been really gracious with your time and support as I’ve been trying to learn expressions and the more complex ins-and-outs of AE, so I wanted to let you know how much it’s appreciated.

[Perry Sheppard]

The trial is fully open for 30 days–which is great–but videos include a watermark. My proof-of-concept is going to require the production of the videos, but also the delivery to the recipients via email; otherwise, it won’t be considered.

[Perry Sheppard]

Templator looks great, but I’m going to need to get this first project out as a proof-of-concept before I can try to make the case for it. At 3-6k/year, I’ll need buy-in on consistent use.

[Perry Sheppard]

Hi Filip, hope you’re doing well. Thanks for this.

I just took a quick look at Templater and I’m already wishing I’d known about this two months ago. They need to bump up their SEO/marketing because it looks great, but this is the first I’ve heard of it in all of my searches (including searches on batch, render farms, etc.). I’m going to do a deep dive into the demo this weekend and see how I might be able to incorporate this into the workflow.

[Perry Sheppard]

One additional nice-to-have would be to also be able to render out the first second of each comp as an animated gif. I know that media encoder can export these, but would either need an in point at 0 time and an out point at 1 second, or the length of the comp would need to be one second.

[Perry Sheppard]

Thanks Tomas,

1. Re: linkage to csv – I need to refine the data set regardless of what approach I take (it’ll only take a few minutes to do), so I have options. I was thinking my best options would be adding a column in the csv for, example, ‘Location’ with content in the format of either ‘United Kingdom.mov’ or simply ‘United Kingdom’. Whichever is most efficient. The comps would ideally be named to match with the originating csv document. Ex. row 2 = comp 2.

2. Re: rendering preference – are you referring to render engine, settings, both? If engine, then either AE Render Engine or Media Encoder. I know that aerender would probably be faster, but I’m not familiar with Terminal and wouldn’t be comfortable using a solution I couldn’t troubleshoot. For output settings, it would be mp4, 1080×1080… I’ve done a fair bit of research on maximizing render efficiency (source file colour space, codecs, etc.), but always open to new info.

3. Re: one-off or not – Ideally, the setup would work with a new data set (the new data set would have exactly the same structure though) and new comp materials. So, the content of the csv rows could change, but the columns would remain identical and the master comp might change, but the approach would remain consistent.

Let me know if I understood your questions. Thanks again 🙂

[Perry Sheppard]

Hi Tomas,

Thanks for your reply. Permutations and combinations abound lol, but, no, it’s just 4,000.

There are 4,000 rows of data and each row contains the information for one individual. Their name, location, and area of interest. There are 4,000 ‘people’, 120 ‘locations’ possible for each individual, and 15 possible ‘areas of interest’ for each individual.

It’s essentially a video mail merge:
Segment 1: The person’s name. This would appear as dynamic, animated text (provided by the csv) in the comp.
Segment 2: Common to all
Segment 3: The person’s location. This would appear as a pre-rendered video specific to the location (video footage to appear would be driven by the csv data).
Segment 4: The person’s area of interest. This would appear as a pre-rendered video specific to the person’s area of interest (video footage to appear would be driven by the csv data).
Segment 5: Common to all

To map out the comp, it would be something like:
Segment 1: Text animation – 8 seconds (text dynamically changes via csv)
Segment 2: Pre-render into – 10 seconds (static)
Segment 3: Pre-render location – 8 seconds (footage dynamically changes via csv)
Segment 4: Pre-render area of interest – 15 seconds (footage dynamically changes via csv)
Segment 5: Pre-render outro – 4 seconds (static)

Thanks again!