Build a Render-Bot in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hello, Joey here. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to automate after effects. We're going to walk through a few different ways of doing this, including building templates that other human beings can use to save you time. And we're also going to build a completely autonomous render robot using templates from data clay, which is a very cool plugin. You are going to love. There is a lot jam packed into this video. You're going to learn a ton. So let's roll those credits.
Joey Korenman : Now, automation is all about saving you time. You're the aftereffects artist. You're the one with the expertise and it sure would be nice if you could spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time doing creative stuff. So the first thing we're going to do is use a really cool feature of after effects and Adobe premier to build a template so that someone who doesn't know after effects can still use your graphics and kick out as many versions as they need. So let's hop into after effects and take a look. So we're going to start with a simple example, and this is a lower third that I have built for a show about birds.
Joey Korenman : It is pretty amazing, good sound effect and everything. So imagine that you're the after effects artist for this show, and you've designed this lower third, and now a lot of your job is going to be doing versions of this lower third. You know, there could be a dozen, two dozen of these per episode, and really it's just a repetitive task. Changing the name, changing the title and rendering out another version. And then of course at the last minute, something changes. So we are going to make it so that anybody, an editor, assistant editor, anyone who can open up Adobe premiere is going to be able to use this template and change it. So the first thing we need to do is figure out what do we need to give the editor or the producer control over? So obviously the name of the guest and the title of the guest, those are the two things that are going to change.
Joey Korenman : Everything else will stay the same. So we're going to use a really cool feature called the essential graphics panel. You can find that in the window menu, essential graphics, and it will open up a panel that looks like this. Now, the first thing you need to do is to tell this panel, which comp you actually want to build controls for. So in this case, we're going to set the master comp to lower third. That's this, this comp right here, and this area here, this is where we're basically just going to build a control panel. And we're only going to put in controls for the things we need. We're going to take all of the complexity of aftereffects out of the equation. So let's start with the guests name. So if we come down here to the name type layer and I hit you, you this'll bring up any properties that have been changed from the default.
Joey Korenman : It's just a shortcut to get me to this source text property. That's the one that I want to give someone control over. And it's as easy as clicking and dragging to the essential graphics panel, letting go. And now we have a control. Now I can rename this into something like guest name, and now you'll see that this is actually linked to that type layer. So if I change it from buck, Finkle to something like a doc, duck Steen or something, you'll see that it automatically updates in the template. All right, then I'm also going to need to put controls in for the title of the guest. So that's line one and line two. There's two type layers here. So let me first come in and grab the source. Text for line one. Now this little message that's popping up is giving me a warning. It's saying that there's an expression on this property. I just dragged in. I'm going to tell you why in a minute. Uh, but basically after effects is just warning me that, you know, this could create some wonky behavior. If you're not aware that there is an expression on the property, I'm just going to say, okay, and I'm going to come up here and I'm going to name this line. Oh one, then I'm going to come down and I'm going to do the same thing with line two.