Video automation
Custom After Effects Automation Pipelines
If your team makes the same kind of video over and over, dozens or hundreds of variations off one After Effects template, the usual options are hiring more editors or paying a platform per render for as long as you keep making video. I build the third one: a pipeline your team owns and runs.
I'm an editor and motion designer, so I build the After Effects templates as well as the pipeline that renders them.
The problem I solve
Every variation of a templated video costs another editor-hour, and every one of them is another chance for the wrong logo or a bad export to reach a client. Meanwhile your best editors spend their week on work that doesn't need them.
What an automated pipeline does
This is the generic shape. Every build gets fitted to how your team actually works.
Intake
Pulls orders from a spreadsheet, form, or system you already use.
Assets
Automatically gathers the right footage, images, logos, and audio for each job.
Render
Drives your After Effects templates headlessly to produce every variation, at volume.
Validate
Checks every output automatically so broken or wrong renders never ship.
Deliver
Uploads finished files and notifies your team where they need it.
What it's built on
I'm not selling you software I wrote. These pipelines run on nexrender driving After Effects headlessly, with FFmpeg checking every file on the way out. That's open source and it's what this is normally done with.
There's no license fee running back to me and nothing charging you by the render. If you and I stop working together, your team still has a system built on tools other people know, instead of something only I understand.
What you're paying for is the part that isn't off the shelf: the templates, the orchestration around the render, the handling for every way a job can fail overnight, and the fitting of all of it to how your team already works. That last part takes the longest and it is where most of these projects stall.
Against the other two options
Most people weighing this up are choosing between a hosted platform and hiring. Here's where I actually fit, including where I don't.
A hosted platform
You pay monthly and usually by the render, for as long as you keep making video. Your templates have to fit how the platform expects them. It works, and if you want something running next week with nobody involved, it's the right answer.
More editors
Cost goes up in a straight line with volume, and good editors spend their week on work that doesn't need them. That holds up while the volume is small and stops holding up as it grows.
A pipeline you own
One build, then it's yours. No per-render fee, and it's shaped around your tools rather than the other way round. It costs more up front than a subscription and it takes longer to stand up. Below a certain volume it isn't worth building, and I'll tell you if that's where you are.
How I build
These pipelines fall over on edge cases rather than on the normal path: a client name too long for the box, a logo that arrives as a 40 megabyte PNG with a transparent border, a render that finishes and is black. I came to this as a motion designer, so I've hit those inside the template myself, and handling them is most of what I'm building.
None of this is theoretical. I designed and built the render pipeline a production team I supervise ran on: order intake, asset gathering, headless rendering, automated checks, and delivery. It took that team's turnaround from a manual, multi-day process down to minutes, and it replaced an outside platform they'd been paying for. I later led the evaluation and migration to the enterprise platform that replaced it.
I wrote the documentation for that system too, and built it to be used with an AI assistant, so someone with no background in it can describe what's going wrong and get walked through the fix. I filmed the tutorials as well, so your team can operate it day to day and sort out most things on the spot.
The pipelines are deterministic. They drive your templates and your assets, and they do the same thing every run, which is what makes the output safe to ship without someone opening every file. I wire them into whatever your business already runs on: spreadsheets, cloud storage, project management, chat, your existing creative software.
What you end up with is built around your workflow, rather than an off-the-shelf tool you have to bend yourself around.
Demo in progress
A working proof-of-concept is on the way
I'm putting together a public standalone demo: a batch render of an After Effects template across my own footage, with the before/after and the code up on GitHub. Until it's posted I can walk you through the approach directly.
Ask about the approachFind out whether a pipeline is worth building
Tell me what your team produces by hand today and roughly how many a month. I'll come back with what a pipeline would cover, and what it wouldn't.