Skip to content

Airtable Airtable

Authorization

  1. Open the AirtableAirtable Window in Dataflow
  2. Click the Sign In button
  3. This will open the Airtable authentication process in your browser
  4. Login with your Account
  5. Grant permissions to the bases you want to connect
  6. Click Authorize
  7. After successful authorization, you should see a success screen in the browser
  8. Return to After Effects

Connect Views

Once authorized, your selected Bases should automatically load into the Base selection Treeview. Expand your desired Base to load its tables and each tables views. With the + Button you can add the selected view to the connected views list. Then press Connect View/s and you are good to go!

Note

Loading the bases and tables/views could take a short amount of time, depending on the amount of items a and your internet connection speed!

Airtable as data source

Airtable support for Dataflow has been added in Version 1.1.0

Since Airtables API is working inherrently different than Google Sheets, there are some lookouts when using it as a data source.

  • Every Airtable Base is limited to 5 API requests per second.
  • Every API request is limited to 100 records.
  • Airtable uses cursor based pagination.

Meaning, dataflow needs to do some extra work to read a specific row number.
As an example, lets say your view has 450 records and you wanna load row 450.
Dataflow loads the first 100 rows, gets a token in airtables response that allows dataflow to load the next 100 rows, and repeats that until we can read row 450.
So naturally, this takes longer than loading a row with a lower number, because we need to make multiple API calls.
Airtable rate limits could be hit if multiple instances of Dataflow are loading Data at the same time, especially if high row numbers are loaded.

Thats why we recommend the following measurements, to have the best experience with Airtable as a data source:

  • Sort views after creation date, so new records always sort at the top of the table as row 1.
  • If using a view without any sorting, we recommend to work from top down anyways so the newest needed data is close to the top.
  • When using Agent Mode, we recommend connecting a filtered view where render-status equals "ready" so that the Agent doesnt have to loop over the entire table with different render-states when looking for new data to process.