Advanced Rendering Practices

Build cost efficient and error prone rendering pipelines

Building jobs at scale requires defensive design. Here’s what we recommend:

Always Provide Fallbacks

Your templates should gracefully handle empty or missing values.

Layer Type	Best Practice
Text	Set a default like “(Missing Title)“
Image	Use a neutral brand logo or placeholder
Audio	Default to silent.mp3 or fallback narration

In After Effects, use if expressions or fallback layers hidden by default.

Implement Retry Logic

Sometimes jobs can fail due to:

• Transient render errors
• Temporary asset access issues
• Internal AE limitations

You can retry a failed job with the exact same payload, or:

• Build retries into your webhook processor
• Query job status with GET /jobs/:id and retry failed states
• Use a queue system that retries status = error

Validate Assets Before Submit

Before rendering, always validate:

• composition name exists (from template introspection)
• layerName matches exactly
• URLs for assets return a 200 OK
• Font dependencies have been preloaded

Use Webhooks to Avoid Polling

Set a webhook.url so your system is notified when jobs complete.

"webhook": {
  "url": "https://yourdomain.com/render-done",
  "method": "POST"
}

This saves on polling requests and scales better across high volume workflows.

Use Secrets for keys management

For cloud execution, some postrender modules require credentials (AWS/GCP keys). You must securely manage these — avoid committing them to version control or exposing them in public requests.

Find more information about Secrets API here.