Audio Visualization That Animates To Music | After Effects CC Tutorial
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In this Video Editing After Effects CC tutorial, Will teaches you how to create an animation that follows audio. This is a popular audio visualization effects that is fairly easy to create.
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
In this video, I'm going to teach you how to animate visuals like what you're seeing on screen now. This is a very cool and popular effect. You see it a lot on music channels on youtube, but there's a lot of other use cases for this effect. So that's what we're creating today using After Effects CC.
Let's jump in after effects open I have a composition created. This one is 1080 but you can make it 4k if you'd like. I have a song imported from Epidemic Sound. We pretty much use them for all our audio and sound effects that you'll see on this channel.
Here’s a link for a free trial of Epidemic Sound: https://bit.ly/2NPCjd7
All right, the first thing we'll do is drag our music into our composition. We'll then create a solid layer which will be where our effect is, and to keep things organized we'll call it visualization. We'll make sure it's the size of our comp. If it's not you can click, make comp size. It doesn't really matter for the color that will be changed when we start creating the effect. Then we'll go to our effects in presets and type in audio. There are two ways to do this you have your audio spectrum and then audio waveform. The audio waveform is more like your classic heartbeat waveform and the audio spectrum effect is better suited for music. So we'll try that one and then in our effect controls window under the audio spectrum effect we just added. Let's change the audio layer to our music so that we have our audio spectrum following our music.
So you get the idea of what this effect can do. However, there are a lot of settings that you can change to make this look a lot better than the default settings. Let's first mess around with the colors. Maybe we'll make this one a little redder, and this one will go to blue, and then we'll cycle through the hue interpolation to change up the colors just a bit, and then you can change from digital to analog dots. Then if you want to show more of like the mirror effect, you can keep it aside A and B or you can change it to just the top or just the bottom.
So we'll keep rs2 digital for now and then we'll start playing with how many lines there are, how tall they are where the frequencies show up, and so on. Let's go up to start and end frequency, these represent the frequencies in your music or your audio file. So depending on the frequencies in your audio file, for example, if you have an electronic track, there's going to be a lot of bass in it which means you'd want to make sure you have the lower frequencies showing; or if your audio file has a lot of higher pitch frequencies then you want to make sure that the end frequencies on the right side are showing up to cover those as well. So let's increase the end frequency to about 50.000, and then under the maximum height, let's raise this much higher. Let's increase the frequency bands a bit. We'll increase the thickness, and since the point of this effect is for the visualization to follow along with your audio file. In this case, we have a music track it's really important that our visuals are in sync with our audio file, so we don't want to adjust anything under the audio duration or audio offset.
You can see here that our maximum height of 7000 is way too high here so let's go ahead and adjust some of the settings to control some of those frequencies. We'll leave the color in style like that and then we'll move on.
Another thing you can do is animate a path. On our solid layer which is now named visualization, we can go up here to our mask and we'll use the ellipse tool, or we can draw our own with the pen tool. We'll hold shift to make a perfect circle and then under the path, we will select our mask one.
We'll go back to our main selection tool and you can see it's cropping a bit. You can just fix that by going to masks > mask 1 and then going into mask expansion and adjusting it there and then back in effect controls you can go to the side options and we can go to side b or a and each one will keep the inside or just the outside.
To take this a step further and to make things a lot more interesting, we have this visualization layer set up. We can then duplicate it, change the sizes, the colors and use this first layer as our starting template. Let's go up to edit and then duplicate. Then we'll press s on our keyboard to open up scale and we'll scale this down to let's say 50. We'll change it to side A and then on our top layer to give it a different look, we'll go into the settings and make some adjustments.
So by using these techniques with all these different settings and layer combinations, you can get some really unique creative effects fairly quickly. That's it for this video. If you like to give it, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more videos from us. We release a new video every single week we have over 60 other film making tutorials on our channel for you to learn from.
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