Making a simple animated template for frequent slight changes

Question

I've made an example version of a news video in After Effects that we will be altering weekly. The template might be used by less skilled people and I'd like to know what (if there are) ways to make it easier to customize it later and how could I do that.

Now the shape has its position and scale keyframed and the clips have their position keyframed. Maybe putting them in a "film reel" and just moving their parent would be more convenient (the idea came while writing here). Weekly we will need to change the number and duration of clips and title size and position. I not afraid to get into coding expressions or something else - maybe it's possible to simplify the process that way somehow?

The project is pretty simple:

• Clips with push transition (like the one you can easily do in Premiere)
• Blurred area with varying size titles for each clip
• A white shape indicating current title (text overlaping with the shape turns black)

The shape moves down as the clips change. Here are 3 screenshots transitioning from a smaller title to a big one:

Answer 1

I would take a learning from templates on videohive. Pre-comp all the text layers and put them in a separate organized folder in the project. This way if they have to edit the after effects file its just a matter of changing the text in the precomped layers. With that being said, I guarantee that you will never have on a week to week basis the same size text layer as there are always more or less characters per word .etc. So you might have to implement some expressions to make boxes increase in height with regards to the text layer.

If you put your text layers in a bounding box this fixes the horizontal width issue, but the height length will have to be figured out.

That being said, once its setup, I know that AE CC 2015 when imported into PP CC 2015 allows for users to edit the text from AE inside of PP which is quite useful in your situation where the users may not have that much AE knowledge.