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, you have three options. Hire more editors. Pay a platform per render, for as long as you keep making video. Or have someone build you a pipeline you own and run yourself. I build the third one.
I'm an editor and motion designer, so I build the After Effects templates as well as the thing that renders them. That's most of why they hold up.
The problem I solve
Making templated video by hand goes wrong more than anyone admits. Every variation 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 are spending 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.
I think that matters, so I'd rather say it up front than have you find out later. 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 actually 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 go wrong at three in the morning. And the fitting of all of it to how your team already works, which is the part that takes the longest and is the reason 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. Fine while the numbers are small. It stops being fine at some point, and you usually notice late.
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 it, and I'll say so.
How I build
Automation falls over on the edge cases, almost never on the happy path. The client name that's too long for the box. The logo that shows up as a 40 megabyte PNG with a transparent border. The render that finishes and is black. I came to this as a motion designer, so I've run into those inside the template rather than read about them in a bug report, and the handling for them is most of what I'm actually 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. Want a walkthrough of the approach before it's posted?
Ask about the approachProducing the same video over and over by hand?
Tell me what your team is making manually today. If it's a fit for automation, I'll sketch out what a pipeline would look like for you.