Batchprocessing in After Effects

[Christian25040900zndn]

Hey, I am trying to automate my simple AfterEffects Workflows i repeadetly have to do.

One of these Tasks is making lower thirds for Videos where 10 people are speaking. 

In After Effects i already got the Project so far, that i can simply type in the Name and Position of the People one by one, and all Animations, Effects and the scaling of the Textbox works automatically.

Is there a way to also automate the last (or in this case first) bit of the task of puttin in Name and Position?

I know that in InDesign there is such a feature, where you can built your layout, feed InDesign a .csv and it automatically exports all your Designs. 

Is there a workflow or script for something like that in Ae?

Thaaanks

[Arie Stavchansky]

You can acheive this with plugins, but I have call out Templater for Adobe After Effects to help you acheive this.  Full disclosure: I am the lead developer of the plugin.  

It's built to suit your needs very easily.  In fact, you don't even need to use CSV files — you can integrate a Google Sheet which is hosted in the cloud.  It automates the re-versioning and rendering of your compositions that you need.

Check out an overview video of Templater on Adobe's Creative Cloud YouTube channel.

Hope this helps!

[Rick Gerard]

The most efficient workflow would be to create a MOGRT for the lower third, load that into Premiere Pro, and edit your ten people in the video movies in Premiere Pro. You create MOGRTs using the Extended Graphics workspace. There are lots of tutorials.

If you must do the editing in After Effects, which is not a recommended workflow, you can work up a JSON file to automate the workflow. Here's the official Adobe workflow handbook: Work with Data-driven animation

I would have to see a screenshot of your comp to give you specific instructions, but you would start with a three-column CSV file that contains an index column, a name column, and a position column, something like this:

1, Bob Smith, Director

2, Jane Doe, First Assistant

3, Bob Jones,  Deputy director

Something like that.

[Mathias Moehl]

Templater is a very powerful option.

More basic (and cheaper) options are CompsFromSpreadsheet and my Text2Spreadsheet.

Also Automation Blocks for Ae has a tool for this, which can be customized easily: