How to Create Many Videos in Bulk using a Spreadsheet

This tutorial will show you how to mass-create videos using a simple spreadsheet or CSV file.

Whether it's video ads, personalized videos, or social media content, producing videos by hand requires a considerable amount of effort. Given that video marketing continues to grow in popularity, we need a way to create videos at scale without being burdened by repetitive tasks.

The good news is that video automation is here to help, since the majority of marketing videos tend to share the same design, but feature different content. This process, called bulk video creation, involves using a spreadsheet to make tons of different videos based on a single video template. It's easy, and it only takes a few minutes to create your own videos in large quantities.

This tutorial shows you how to batch-create videos like the one below, although you can use it for any video as it comes with an online editor that allows you to create your own templates:

How to bulk-create videos using a spreadsheet?

Make sure you've got a Creatomate account if you want to follow along. Don't have one yet? Create your free account here.

The first thing we'll do is create a template that will serve as the basis for the videos. After that, we'll make a feed, which is basically a spreadsheet that we use to create a bunch of videos all at once. Once we have added data to our feed, we can generate our videos at the click of a button. Finally, we'll download the videos to our computer.

As we wrap up, we will suggest a few ways to automate the process even further.

Ready, set, go!

1. Create a video template

Log in to your account, navigate to the Templates page and click + New. You can choose a ready-made template from the gallery or design your own from scratch. For this tutorial, let's go with the Quick Promo template from the Featured category. The 1:1 Square size is fine and click Create Template to open the template in the editor.

This template can be completely customized to fit our needs, but let's use it as-is for the purpose of this tutorial. Keep in mind that templates contain dynamic elements, which are the parts of the video that we want to replace in bulk (e.g., text captions, images, background videos, etc.).

In our Quick Promo template, the Text-1, Text-2 and Video elements are all dynamic. Through the feed we're about to create, we can replace these elements with other texts, images, and clips in order to make unique variations based on that video template:

If this sounds confusing, don't worry. It'll be a lot easier to grasp when we work with the feed, which we'll do in the next few steps.

2. Create a feed

Click Use Template in the top right of the template editor. Let's choose the Spreadsheet to Video option. We can select an existing feed from our project, or use the Create New Feed option.

After clicking Continue, we'll be taken to our newly created feed. Now we can populate it with data to create video variants, which is what we'll do next.

3. Enter data

Your feed is made up of rows each representing a single video. So in order to create more videos, simply click Add Row. In the right-hand panel, you'll see a preview of your video as you enter data:

• Video column: select a video file from your computer or enter a URL to a public video.
• Text-1 and Text-2 columns: feel free to enter any text here.

You can add as many rows as needed. Make sure to click Save when done. After saving, the status column updates from "Unsaved Row" to "No Render", meaning the rows are saved but no video is created yet (which is called a Render).

Next, we'll generate our videos.

4. Generate videos

Under the video preview, notice the three options; Edit template, Create render and Download render. By clicking Create render, the video will be built for that row:

There is an even easier way to render multiple videos, and that's by selecting the corresponding rows, clicking n Rows Selected and clicking Create Renders. After confirming our action, the videos will be rendered all at once, which may take a few minutes:

When the videos are being built, the status indicates Rendering, and will change to Rendered when the videos are ready.

In the next step, we'll download the videos to our computer.

5. Download videos

In the same way we created renders, we can download a single video by clicking the Download render button under the video preview:

To download the rendered videos in bulk, select some rows, click n Rows Selected, and then click Download Renders. Here, you can choose a file name. Then, click Download. A ZIP file with the rendered videos will be downloaded to your device.

Wrapping up

Now you know how to create videos in bulk – easy, right? Here's what you can do next:

• Render multiple templates at once using the same feed. You can accomplish this by assigning a tag to these templates on the Templates page. Then, select this tag in the top right corner of the feed. You can use the feed mapping to connect each template to the feed and render the videos as we did in this tutorial.
• Export the entire feed, including renders, and use it elsewhere.
• Connect Zapier or Make/Integromat to your feed to trigger an automated workflow (e.g., auto-post them to social networks) after the videos have been rendered.