Using Automation Blocks to Create Randomized + Large Batch Edits from .csv Spreadsheets

[Kyle276076892qsq]

Hi all! New to Automation Blocks but there are a few automations I am running now that are incredibly helpful. I am hung up on this on project I'd love to share to see if anyone has any ideas.

Alright my situation is this; I have a batch of 5 video clips, 1 music track, and 5 png graphics. I want to keep the music track and png graphics the same, but create 125 Adobe Premiere sequences (every combination of clip 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). From my playing around so far (and I still have alot to do) it seems like my best option would be to create the 125 combinations in excel first? Then I am wondering if I'd be able to automate the population of the 125 Premiere video sequences and send them immediately to render out. 

Hope that makes sense. Let me know if anyone has completed any projects like this or has any automations that could help! All the best and I'm looking forward to hearing from the pros. 

[Mathias Moehl]

Great to hear that AB is so useful for you, Kyle 🙂

To pick videos randomly, the following blocks could be useful:

- Random Number

- Get in List: This block also has an option to get a random element. In this snippet, we create a list with three project items and then pick one randomly:

Of course, if you pick elements randomly like that, it can happen that the same elements are picket twice.

If your want create all possible combinations, you can do that with nested loops.

Say you have 5 clips and want to show exactly 3 of them in each video. Assuming that no video should contain the same clip twice, you can loop over all possible combinations with nested for each loops like this:

The block code xml is also attached.

To learn more about what to do with each combination of clips, see here:

https://docs.mamoworld.com/automation-blocks/tutorials-pr/mogrtFromSpreadsheet

Here I extended the example from above such that for each variant the first three clips in the active sequence are replaced with the chosen project items and then the instance is added to the render queue:

[Mathias Moehl]

And here is the xml block code for the second example...

[Kyle276076892qsq]

Mathias! Thank you very much for creating these automations and for the thorough explanations! I really appreciate it. This is pretty new to me so I am working on understanding the order of operations and how alot of these automations work. I'm slowly but surely getting better thanks to you. I will be testing all of this out shortly and be working to tweak the automation as needed. 

I've concluded I will have 4 clips. Something I am going to test out is: From my batch of 4 clips, if I want to pick ALL 4 of them for each iteration of the video

(1234, 1243, 1324, 1342, 1423, 1432, 2134, 2143, 2314, 2341, 2413, 2431, 3124, 3142, 3214, 3241, 3412, 3421, 4123, 4132, 4213, 4231,
4312, 4321) for all 24 unique sequence combinations) could I extend this section:

to include
"for each item c4"
"if c4 does not equal c1 and c4 does not equal c2 and c4 does not equal c3"
Then write to console

Thanks again! Looking forward to learning more and more about automation blocks. All the best

[Mathias Moehl]

Yes, you can definitely stack a fourth "for each item" loop with another if condition inside it exactly in the way you described it.

[Ecomguru123]

Kyle - was wondering if you ever solved this and were able to achieve your desired result? 

[Mathias Moehl]

I just created this tutorial, which shows a similar workflow:

https://docs.mamoworld.com/automation-blocks/tutorials-pr/batchSequenceCreation