Enabling and Disabling The Bot

Enabling The Bot means that you effectively turn it on. When you enable The Bot, Templater enters into a server mode and begins checking your data source periodically at regular intervals. You can get Templater out of this mode by disabling, or turning off, The Bot.

WARNING If using a URL feed as a data source, ensure that you have registered a custom script to update "render-status" values at appropriate events to avoid re-rendering "ready" data. As of version 2.1.10, the Post Job, Post Batch, and On Bot Disable events are broadcast.

Before enabling The Bot, ensure that the following conditions are met:

Your data source contains a render-status column.
At least some of the row values in the render-status column are populated with the value ready.
Be prepared to manually empty the disk cache after each job if you have not optimized AE disk caching for Templater.

How do I empty the AE disk cache?

In After Effects, go to Edit > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache. Then, in the Disk Cache section, click Empty Cache and click OK. If this button is disabled, the cache is already empty.

Follow these steps to enable The Bot:

In the Templater panel, click Enable Bot.
Once enabled, the button label changes to Disable Bot and Templater's user interface freezes except for the Disable Bot button.
The Bot starts to periodically check the data source for rows with a render-status of ready.

Follow these steps to disable The Bot:

In the Templater panel, click Disable Bot.
After disabling, Templater executes the On Disable shell script specified under the Bot Settings area in the Templater Preferences dialog. To learn more about hooking scripts into Templater processes, see Event Scripts.