[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Perry, sorry for my late response, yet I see Filip might gave you a path to chase already. While I am an advocat for Templater all the time whenever I have a chance to do that (use it myself and for clients), before committing now or later you should consider whether it will be beneficiary in the long run.

Reason why I do say so – it has some learning curve as well, thus going in an easier path from a first sight (to get things finished now) might seem a great choice, but it also provides cons, when in the future you will still need scripting, sooner or later. Thus its better to go that harder path sooner, IMO! (: Unless you don’t have intentions for automation – then its out of question. Yet, considering where everything is going to in the tech, knowing automation well enough is beneficial!

On a different note, as Filip mentioned – approaches are trivial and depends on everyones experiences/taste. Personally I wouldn’t recommend parsing .csv, but instead – run a batch script which creates N projects and do replacement in each of them. Having XXXX comps in a project is not a sustainable choice, nor rendering all of them in a single project through Render Queue.

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Sergio, any chance to get a glance to occurring error?

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Perry, thanks for reassuring me down to 4,000 videos only, haha! This all makes a lot more sense and clearer in general.

Now what is important here, is how you are going to do that ‘linkage’ between pre-rendered assets and the .csv.
1. Will it be based in some way on file names, or otherwise?
2. Assuming files replacement is sorted – what is your rendering preference?
3. Is it a single-outputs generation only, or might be further updated in the future with other data sets?

Cheers!

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Perry, to begin this – this could be solved relatively easy with scripting, but I have one question:

Considering segment 1 has 4000 options, and segment 3 and 4 contains even more customisations… Wouldn’t it turn into 4000x120x15 variations (blows my mind thinking about results, haha), if videos suppose to be unique? Elaborating further on what you have in mind for those segment-variations would be a good idea to help you out better!

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Filip, well – yes and no again from my point of view, haha!

Considering aerender.exe approach you mentioned – what you do with a rendered output, when it finishes? If it is image sequences, you also need audio to be rendered. Proper profiles defined, etc. And yes, encoding it to final output too, whether its lossless single output or sequences.

Thus, while it “kind of” helps, it adds extra work – who wants to do extra tedious work, raise your hand, haha!

This is why it is a questionable approach, which requires excessive management, if done manually, IMO ☺ So talking about general use case scenarios for most users, without many bells and whistles – I would say AME 95% of a time.

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Filip, well, I can’t agree more, but at the same time – disagree as well, haha!

Its a bummer that rendering through Render Queue disables you from using AE – thus, whenever project is not terribly complex, AME works just fine.

And not to mention additional encoding to web-friendly formats.. Thus unless person is capable in automation of things through ffmpeg and stuff, AME is pretty much time saver, till a certain point 🙂

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Solinda, additionally to what Filip has suggested, I think adding text-tracking could be also a good way of overcoming this issue,

Meaning – when text lenght goes beyond certain value, text tracking between characters decreases. Then – you won’t have stretched out text, nor different font families – win win!

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Liviu, just wondering – how sustainable is solution based on specific word index? And at the same time – how you will make sure indexes are correct?

Last but not least – how many text layers are to be considered in the scheme, or it can vary greatly?

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Filip has a good point here – prior planning is needed, in order to make it happen in a more clear way, with less friction and back and forth. Yet solely on my previous experiences in this field of data-driven animations, making them comparable through expressions is an overkill – too slow, too limited. While it has benefits of instant data updates when updating the file – its not beneficial enough IMO.

Nor it provides enough flexibility and easiness of customisation. My vote would be to go scripting instead, but of course – learning how to achieve similar through expressions is a good path to familiarise with expressions world!

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[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Filip, thanks a lot for sharing, nicely done. I made a test comparison to inspect whether it works – and can confirm, it definitely does work as expected. Few notices:

1. Great idea about using extra comp as util to be handled – haven’t thought about it and thats definitely a workaround to have in mind, thank you!
2. Did you actually tried rendering the output and see how expression being affects computation? I haven’t tried that, but at least in the viewport, it seams a bit laggy, even with valueAtTime(0), as it is being recalculated and not actually stored IMO. Due to this fact, I would suggest for anyone, who are going to use this, apply expression towards the end of the template finalising ! Unless a different approach could be suggested.

Overall – great piece of work!

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