Autograf Examples

👋🏼 Welcome to Dataclay's repository of example Autografs™︎ to help you hit the ground running with Templater® for Adobe After Effects®. The intention of this repository is to help new Templater users understand the possibilities for automating video content creation.

These examples focus on the technical side of rigging layers and comps for automation which means their visual design has taken a back seat 😃 — so please forgive the lack of quality in the actual motion design. Our hope is that you take what you learn from inspecting these Autografs and go on to build beautiful, energetic, dynamic compositions driven by data.

If you would like to see commercially available Autografs available to license, please visit Dataclay's marketplace to see some truly beautiful designs with impressive technical rigging.

What is an Autograf?

An Autograf is an After Effects project authored with Dataclay's Templater plugin. It is an After Effects project that is prepared for automatic versioning and rendering.

In most cases, Autografs ship with:

• an After Effects project file prepared for Templater automation, and
• sample data that is structured according to how the author rigged the Autograf.

Who are these Autografs for?

Assets in this repository are intended for Templater users 😎 who want to learn various rigging techniques for transforming their static, non-dynamic, After Effects projects into Autografs that Templater can automatically version and render.

How to use these Autografs

1. Get a local copy of this repository onto your machine.
   When viewing this page on GitHub, ensure the branch is set to main as shown in the screenshot. Then click the Code button to clone or download this repository into a directory on your local drive where your After Effects application is installed.

2. Open an Autograf inside of After Effects.
   Launch AE and go to File > Open and choose the .aep file within the Autograf's /projects sub-directory.
   
   ⚠️ IMPORTANT NOTE: The Autograf project files may be built in a version of After Effects that is different from the version installed on your machine. If you have a newer version of AE installed, but open an .aep file built in an earlier version, AE will automatically upgrade the project file to be compatible with the newer version of AE. You will need to re-save the converted project file in order for it to work with Templater. Unfortunately, you cannot open a newer .aep file in an older version of After Effects. If you can, please use the .aep files for After Effects 2025 as the ones prior to that version may not be setup in accordance to the instructions in this readme. You can still use the older .aep files, but they will require adjustments to the data, footage, and output fields in Templater's main panel.

3. Connect Templater to some sample data.
   Once you have the project file open inside AE, launch the Templater panel by going to Window > Templater X.jsxbin. In the launched Templater panel, within the Batch Assets group of controls, at the right of the Data field, click the [...] button to open a file picker dialog and navigate to the Autograf's sub-directory and choose a .json file containing sample data found in the Autograf's data folder. Learn more about the data source types that work with Templater.
   
   💡TIP While the repository includes local JSON files for the Autografs, Dataclay maintains a public, view-only, Google Sheet that can also be used with Templater. To use it as Templater's data source, first make a copy of it to your Google Drive account. Then, link Templater to that copied Sheet by clicking the Google Drive icon button and follow the on-screen instructions to sign in and authorize Templater to link to the specific worksheet tab for the Autograf you are working with.

4. Set a footage root directory.
   In the Batch Assets group of controls, at the right of the Footage field, click the [...] button to open a file picker dialog and choose the footage folder within the Autograf's sub-directory. Read more about Templater's source footage root.

5. Preview the data in your comp.
   In the Transport group of controls, specify a range of versioning jobs you want to preview. To kick things off, enter 1 into the Start field and then 10 into the Finish field. This means that Templater will only preview data for job 1 through job 10. Adjust these values at anytime to change the range of jobs that you want Templater to preview. Next, click on any of the arrow buttons within the Transport controls to traverse through the data to see how it looks in the main comp. Learn more about previewing data inside your comps.

6. Process the data into new output.
   First, in the Output Options group of controls, click the [...] button to the right of the Destination field to open a file picker dialog. Then, choose the output folder within the Autograf's sub-directory. Next, click Load Settings & Module Templates to load AE's Render Settings and Output Modules into the dropdown menus. By default, Best Settings and High Quality are selected, but you can choose the ones for your preference. Finally, click on either Spot Check, Replicate, or Render in the main Templater panel to begin processing the connected data into new output. Learn more about Templater's output destination.

7. View the outputs
   After batch processing finishes, click the navigate button to the left of the Destination field to open the destination folder. You will see the outputs in that directory.

Included Assets

Each example Autograf is organized in sub-folders. The following Autografs are included:

text-i18n

A very basic starter Autograf to help you with text internationalization (i18n) in your video compositions. It uses an animated "Happy New Year" phrase as the basis for translation. If you need help building an Autograf for text translation, start with this project. With this Autograf, you will see how to set fonts from a data source, and how to connect guide text layers to expression code. Review the local JSON file that works with this Autograf.

drive-text-color

See how to change a text layers' fill color from Templater's connected data source using expression code applied to a fill effect. While connected to a tiny sample data set of capital cities, this extremely bare bones example will get you familiar with how you can easily use data in your expression code. You will also see basic data mapping to footage layers.

daily-reminder

A very basic Autograf for a short "daily reminder" video. It was built to showcase the rudimentary basics of Dataclay's Time Sculpting technique. The audio layers are mapped to references of footage assets with varying duration for each versioned output. By inspecting the audio layers' Templater Settings effect, within the Time group of params, you will see how parameter settings can cause different layers to shift in time when Templater swaps audio footage assets. It also showcases color theming by utilizing expression code on various composite elements that make use of a single HEX value.

display-albums

The very first Autograf built with Templater! This is a relic from the Templater 1.0 days, but it still works flawlessly. It shows text, footage, and solid layers mapped to a sample data set of music albums by various artists. Also, you can see how fonts specified in data can update a text layer's character style. Some references to footage assets in the sample data are invalid by design so you can see how Templater handles faulty footage. You can also see what the purpose of the target property is when performing batch output operations. With the target property, you can have Templater output a specific composition within the project.

text-animators-highlight

A skeleton Autograf for understanding how to use Templater, together with After Effects' Text Animators tools, to control fill colors of a range of words within a text layer. This know-how is frequently requested by Templater users, so dive in to learn the ins and outs of the technique. Read more about this technique on the Dataclay forums, too!

ai-avatar-srt-mogrt

As one of the more advanced examples, this Autograf showcases how Templater updates subtitles, stored in referenced SRT files, as it processes its connected data. It also showcases how Templater can update a pre-comp's Essential Properties from its connected data source. You can also see how to use remote footage sources for content inside the Autograf. This example uses lip-sync animations created with HeyGen from avatars created with MidJourney. The included SRT data files were exported from the HeyGen videos using whisper-video which uses OpenAI to convert spoken audio to speech on a local machine.

motivational-quotes

A very basic, text-only, Autograf that uses expression code to animate a multi-line text layer, but where the layer's content is driven by the data source. This is an extremely basic project that intended for users to get ramped up with basic data mapping. If you are having difficulty with getting Templater to "just work" then try out this Autograf.

Other resources for learning

If you want the real nitty gritty on Templater, head over to our official documentation, join and participate in the Dataclay Forums, or watch our videos on the @dataclay YouTube channel.

Contributing

At Dataclay, one of our goals is to create a community of motion designers and developers who want to push video automation techniques forward. Do you have an awesome Autograf that you want to share with the community? If so, feel free to setup a folder structure for your Autograf in the following manner:

• My Beautiful Autograf
  The root of your Autograf can hold a preview image of what it looks like when opened inside After Effects, similar to the preview images in this readme. You can also provide a README.md file that explains how to use your Autograf.

  • /projects
    A subfolder that holds your After Effects project file you authored with Templater.

  • /data
    A subfolder that holds sample data in JSON format. Your sample data set can be small or large — usually a minimum of about ten rows and a maximum of 100 work well for sample data.

  • /footage
    A subfolder that holds any static footage assets used in the AE project or referenced from the data source. Please consider the byte size of the assets as storage can become an issue upon committing.

  • /output
    A placeholder subfolder users can reference for Templater's output destination. This repository's .gitignore will not track any digital assets within the /output folder, but it's useful to have as a placeholder for Templater's users.

Issue a pull request and the Dataclay team will review your work to merge it into this repository. We are grateful for your contribution!

Support

Thank you for testing out these Autografs with Templater! If you find they do not work for you, and if the additional learning resources do not help fix the issues you encounter with these Autografs, please feel free to contact us via Dataclay's support, or simply add an entry to this repository's issues tab.

Happy Rendering!!!