Templating broadcast for sanity

Broadcast work lives or dies by templating. Two seasons of The Big Bake meant roughly 280 unique title cards, scoreboards and bumpers. None of those were hand-keyed. Anything you hand-key twice, you should template.

The math

A hand-built title card took about 40 minutes — duplicate, retype, re-time, render. A templated one took 6.

40 min × 280 cards = 187 hours
 6 min × 280 cards =  28 hours
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            saving = 159 hours

That's a month of work, freed up to actually design.

The pipeline

Four master comps in After Effects, parameterised through an expression sheet. The producer fills in a CSV with the per-episode data. The comp re-renders. A script kicks off Media Encoder in batch mode.

The expressions read from a JSON config baked into the project. The config lists every field — episode number, contestant names, scoreboard positions, lower-third copy — and the comp's text layers, position keys and visibility flags all hook in.

Templating is not a creative shortcut. The creative direction goes into the rig. Once the rig is good, you crank the handle. The work is in the rig.

What I'd do differently

I'd build the CSV-to-render bridge as a real tool with a UI, not a chain of scripts. By season two it was robust but illegible to anyone but me. A small Electron app with three input fields and a render queue would have been a better long-term asset.