Automated rendering of After Effects or similar Initially posted on graphicdesign.stackexchange.com:

I'm looking for a way to integrate animations into our existing product. The animations would essentially be 30 second commercials containing some variable data (names, dates, numbers). The system needs to automatically render the animation when the user pushes a button. These are non-technical users, so it needs to be all very black-box.

It looks to me like we could use After Effects for this, but I am not a designer so I'm looking for confirmation and suggestions from the experts. This is how I see it working:


We have a designer create an AE project for each desired animation. 
The AE project is set up to pull the variable data from a file at render time. 
When our user pushes the button, the system generates the data file and puts it into a folder known to the AE project. 
The system then kicks off the render using aerender.exe.
When rendering is complete, the system shows the animation.


Does this sound like a reasonable way to proceed? Any alternative suggestions?

One area I'm concerned about is the data merge part. Can an AE project be set up to automatically do that at the time of rendering (i.e. initiated by aerender.exe)?
After Effects can be automated using the Adobe extendscript scripting language,  and can be run from the command line, meaning that it can be integrated into other processes.

Extendscript is JavaScript and it works across Adobe's product line (to varying degrees, you can use it to script Photoshop for instance). If you have a JavaScript developer available then this would be a relatively straightforward task.

There are also third party frameworks such as Dataclay that make the process easier for non-technical users to avoid scripting, but they are relatively pricey, though they might work out cheaper than hiring a developer and rolling your own.