Dataclay Templater
Templater is an Adobe® After Effects® plugin that simplifies and accelerates the process of creating customized videos. It empowers motion graphics artists and post-production pros to quickly and easily produce a large volume of beautiful videos that will resonate with their audiences. Templater is a great workflow automation tool for both designers and developers. Its enterprise features provide a fully automated server solution for versioned video-on-demand, relieving technical operators from menial production tasks and empowering developers to integrate dynamic video content into their apps.
I personally coded this app out of my joy for creating video — I love the magic of visual effects and motion graphics. After working in many studios like Digital Kitchen and Sony Online Entertainment, I found that creating new versions of the same video was an arduous task. This made the actual work a bit unbearable, and led me to solve a workflow problem that myself and others had to contend with. My goals was to streamline production workflows by automating them.
At this point in the product's lifecycle, I cannot take all the credit for its existence — after all a software application is the manifestation of an ongoing dialog between its creator and its users. End-users, and the team at Dataclay, continue to astound me with ideas for what should come next for Templater.
Regarding technical matters, I coded Templater with Javascript, C++, and Python. By implementing a unique network communication class into Templater, I effectively turned After Effects into a kind of web browser. I also coded the automated build processes so that iterating and releasing new versions of Templater is simple.
What problem does it solve and who uses it?
Four years after Templater's release it was time to produce a narrative of how people were actually using our software to solve their problem. I produced an explainer video that aimed to do this. Working collaboratively with a script writer, character animator, a voice over actor, and sound designer, we came up with this video summarizing a use-case in the ad agency vertical.
What does it do exactly?
It automates workflows for people who work in motion graphics or video post-production. It has a host of features, but the most profound ones are that it turns After Effects into a server and that it can intelligently adjust an entire composition when the duration of a single layer changes from version to version.
How did it start?
In my notebooks! I had an idea, and I just started to sketch. As I sketched, I developed the product and had my designer colleagues take a peek every now and again. It seemed that folks understood the opportunities that could arise from using it.
How does it work?
Templater is a sophisticated extension that lives inside Adobe After Effects. It's feature rich and sports both a graphical and command line interface. Over time we listened to our end-users to add and improve features for use in mission critical projects such as live events. Templater's UI may change, but its power keeps on increasing.
The following are screenshots of the many graphical user interfaces as they have evolved. The first three screenshots show how the main panel has improved over the course of nine years.
Protecting Templater
Some users told me I should patent some of the features because they were incredibly powerful. Eventually, I worked with a law firm to successfully protect a interactive technique I designed and named Time Sculpting. This is set of user-configurable rules to account for time-based layer elements that change in duration when a master video template is updated. Editors and compositors tend to grasp it as an "intelligent ripple edit".
I drafted all of the following diagrams for the Time Sculpting patent application. It was a long process, but was issued to my name in December of 2019. It is one of the accomplishments in my varied career that I am very proud of.
Explaining Time Sculpting
Following the feature launch, the Dataclay team and I developed a suite of illustrative examples that clarify the influence of Templater's layer configurations on the positioning and timing within a composition's timeline. We employed animation to enhance comprehension, integrating these demonstrations into Templater's official technical documentation.
Packaging Time Sculpting
A good deal of work went into this feature for Templater. So, I had some fun and made a sizzler video for it. Maybe it was over the top, but the aim was to get end-users excited about it.
Templater's future
As a designer, it's important to consider how significant technological advances might be incorporated into applications that are tried and tested. Generative AI is one such advancement. After doing some cursory research about what end-users would find valuable, I experimented with integrating ChatGPT responses into After Effects text layers. With Large Language Models, the future is very bright for content creators.
Licensing and distributing Templater
Of course, it's always important to protect intellectual property in a way that allows its owner to continue to develop it. In the beginning we partnered with aescripts+aeplugins to license and distribute the software. To drive more traffic to our partner site, I designed and implemented this early microsite showcasing Templater.
After some time licensing exclusively through our trusted partner, we were able to license it directly to customers which expanded our user base. This is Templater's current landing page at Dataclay's site that I designed. Implementation was handled by the Dataclay team.
Designing for a community of users
After years of Templater being available in the market, it's become evident to me that the success of an interactive product is largely due to the community of people who find value in it. I am grateful for all the exposure Templater has received from our end-users and absolutely love to see them explain how they adopt it into their own workflows. Here are a few videos of motion design influencers showcasing Templater's power.
A complete overview
Technology evangelism is critical to educating end-users. Here is a video I produced for the Adobe Creative Cloud YouTube channel. They helped Templater gain exposure via their own social network promotions. While the video is long and dense, it offers a complete overview of Templater working in tandem with Google Sheets and Dataclay QUE.
