How does The Bot work?

Here is an overview of how you can use The Bot to automatically version your AE project as a background process:

1. Set up your AE project by using the Templater Settings effect to tag video composition layers as dynamic, set up a data source, and link the data source to your project.
2. Enable, or turn on, The Bot. See Enabling and Disabling The Bot for details on how to do this.
3. Add or update data source rows either manually or through an integrated front-end application.
4. The Bot periodically checks the data source for new data. When first enabling, you may have to wait for The Bot to do this.
5. When checking the data source, The Bot retrieves rows with a render-status value of ready.
6. The Bot updates all retrieved rows' render-status to queued.
7. For each queued row:
   1. The Bot updates its render-status to processing.
   2. Templater versions and outputs the target composition with its data.
   3. The Bot updates its render-status to done. However, if The Bot encounters errors during processing, it will set render-status to a code such as ERR::MEDIA or ERR::AFXHOST.
8. After all retrieved rows are done, The Bot continues to periodically check for new rows in the data source.

WARNING  When The Bot updates the render-status column, as of Templater 2.9.5, any formulas in the render-status cells are overwritten with the formula's result. Earlier versions of Templater would overwrite all formulas in processed rows.