Project Setup

BatchRender maps data onto your project purely by name. Setting up a project means naming things consistently.

Name text layers after columns

Rename each text layer that should receive data to exactly match its column name. Layer names are what count, not the text content.

Best practice

Only the match matters, not the style of the name. A convention that holds up well is lowercase with hyphens (headline, price-tag, cta-text), written identically in the project and in the data.

Name footage items after columns

For image or video swapping, rename the footage item in the project panel (not the layer) to match the column. All layers using that footage update when the source is swapped.

What a footage cell can hold is described under Content columns: footage.

Best practice

Keeping swappable footage in one dedicated folder and pointing Footage Path at it keeps your data short: filenames only, and moving the folder later means changing one field in the panel instead of every row.

One template comp

Point the comp column at the composition to render. Different rows can target different comps in the same project, for example one comp per aspect ratio:

comp	output	headline
Promo-16x9	promo_wide	Big Sale
Promo-9x16	promo_story	Big Sale

Multiple projects

If your versions live in different project files, use the project column with an absolute path to the .aep. BatchRender opens the project before rendering the row. Rows without a project value render in whatever project is currently open.

If the row’s project path is already the open project, BatchRender keeps it open as-is. Otherwise it closes the current project and opens the new one without saving, discarding any unsaved changes in the project that was open.

Caution

Save your work before running a batch that switches projects. Unsaved changes in the project that is open when the switch happens are gone.

Test with a single row

Before a long batch, preview a single row to check that every name matches. Catching a mismatch there costs seconds; catching it 200 rows in costs the batch.