4 Audio Spectrum Visualizer Techniques in After Effects | Tutorial

all right in this video we're going to talk about four audio visualization effects right here in after effects let's take a listen [Music] hey what's going on internet this is josh noel from sun duck film welcome to our channel if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button hope everyone's doing excellent today so there's so many different ways to create these audio visualization effects that i'm just going to talk about four techniques that you can use in any way that you want to build your very own custom one so you don't you're not bound to what i'm creating you create whatever you want you know um and put some really creative work into it so without wasting time let's jump in let's talk about these four techniques let's get started feel free to download our project files for free if you want to use this as a template or if you just want to follow along with our videos all right so here we are in our tutorial composition these are all optional elements but you can use a background i already have one in here and a logo that's completely up to you and i have our soundtrack in here so those are the basic elements that you should think about having obviously you're going to need a soundtrack so the first technique what we're going to do is talk about how to create a waveform that's going to take the shape of any shape that you want so the first thing we need to do is go to layer new solid you call it waveform and one thing that i suggest doing is make sure that the width and height is larger than your composition this way the waveform can you know go off the comp or whatever just my suggestion then let's go to effect generate and let's grab audio spectrum all right so the first thing you should do is go to your audio layer and set that to your soundtrack layer always do that and you'll see that it'll pick up something from your soundtrack layer that's totally fine what we want to do is create a shape so we'll do is come here and we'll grab one of the tools here you can use the pen tool it's up to you but we'll grab the ellipse tool because i want to do a perfect circle here and from the center of our composition what i'm going to do is click a point hold down shift and control my keyboard and this will allow me to draw out a perfect circle around our logo here and then what we're gonna do is we'll come here to path and we're gonna set to mask one all right so now you can take your audio react waveform and adjust it to any shape that you want all right technique number two is setting up our waveform for success and getting the basic effects in out of the way so what we're going to do is come here to our audio spectrum effect that we've already created and we can come here to frequency bands and go ahead and increase that and this will increase how many bands are in here and one thing you want to do is if you use the mask go ahead and set your mask to none so it doesn't clip anything here off the top and one thing i want to do is come here to side options and set this aside b this way all the waveform stuff will be outside and our shape will look good then we can come here to maximum height and go ahead and increase that and that's nice and the reason why you want to create a solid that's larger than the compositions because then we can always scale this down and we're still going to have that detail in there so completely up to you that's why you want to make this solid larger than your composition you know one thing i like to do is maybe bring down the thickness to two and this is where we get to play with our color so i'm gonna come here and just kind of select this pinkish color here and what we're gonna do is we're coming to hue interpolation and we can increase the degree by a little bit and you'll get a little bit of a multi-color variation here and one thing i like is checking on duration averaging and one last thing we'll do here is come to effect stylize and we'll grab glow we'll take this effect and we'll duplicate it so we have glow too and we'll come here to glow radius and maybe we'll set this up to 90. you won't be able to hear the song but i promise that this entire thing is reacting correctly to the music soundtrack all right and before we move on and finish out our audio visualization i've got to give a huge shout out to our 1400 plus motion graphics professionals pack right here for after effects so this is our motion graphics professionals pack which has over 1400 templates right here for after effects along with a handful of categories but one category we'll take a look at is the titles so what you can do is preview a template before you apply and when you find the right template you click on apply and with a click of a button we have a full title animation inside of our composition we can go into that comp and quickly change out our titles and you can easily change colors with a click of a button and everything will update in our main composition this animated background is from our motion graphics high tech category where you can just apply a really cool background we also have some really cool particle overlays in here as well that you can apply into any after effects project so if you're looking to save a tremendous amount of time while producing awesome work right here for after effects you can take a look at our 1400 motion graphics professionals pack i will link it below if you do pick up anything off our website you will be supporting our channel so thank you very much all right so we're going to create multiple variations of our audio effect here to create something really unique you're going to create a handful of different things so please experiment with the settings so we already have our basic waveform here what we're going to do is we're going to take this layer and we're going to duplicate it so what we can do is come here to display options and set this to analog dots and you saw the layer you'll get some dots here that looks good but what we need to do is come into thickness and maybe increase this to nine so that will really stand out there and we should change the color of this to a different color so you know obviously it can really stand out so we'll go ahead and do that and you know it looks pretty cool maybe we'll just come here to hue interpolation and set that to zero degrees so we have no problem there so we have one variation there and that looks great but we can also take one of these glow effects and duplicate it and just reset the settings so that will stand out even more on the edges um or whatever you want to do with that i think that looks great all right one thing that bothers me is that there's no like actual circle here you see like oh you have all these straight lines that come here we want to be able to kind of connect this with a circle so we'll do take our original waveform the lines here and we'll duplicate it and we'll put it at the bottom of everything here and we're going to decide options and set this to side a so that'll be on the inward part of everything and one thing we need to do is increase the frequency bands up to like maybe 1700 and that's going to give us a very straight line like that we'll come here to the maximum height and we need to bring this down to like maybe 430 and so it doesn't over cut for our logo and i think that looks great one thing we should absolutely do is go to effect generate and grab a gradient ramp and kind of just select the top colors there and kind of select the bottom color here so that will blend in a little bit better you know that looks really good all right and then let's take our waveform lines again let's duplicate that bring that to the bottom and let's come here with the color change this to white and let's come here to frequency bands go ahead and increase that by a little bit here to maybe 380 or so and then let's come here to maximum height and let's really increase this let's come here with thickness and let's set this to point six and let's come here to the softness and let's set that to zero percent so you'll get these straight hard lines here you can continue to increase the maximum height if you wish and in fact i'm actually going to bring down the thickness by a little bit more than that and i'll hit my keyboard for opacity and kind of lower down the opacity by a touch all right so then what we'll do is take our waveform lines again duplicate it come here to the bottom one and this time around we'll come here back to the digital option and we'll come here to analog dots we can increase the thickness of this perfect and this will give you just some more options to work with when creating a really cool you know audio waveform effect all right so you'll have a really cool audio reaction effect but we've really got to take this next level by syncing this to some really creative effects here and it's really where you go crazy with this and the options are unlimited so let me show you how we can set this up for really cool success so what we can do is come here and create say an adjustment layer okay i'll go to effect distort and grab cc lens one of my favorite effects and you know i can come here and increase the size of this composition and do some crazy stuff see kind of pulls the composition around i want to be able to sync this to the beat of the track so what we can do is take our soundtrack layer and right click it go to uh keyframe assistant and grab convert audio to keyframes it'll create a null layer here you can come here and delete left and right channel because we don't need those the goal here is to hit u twice on your keyboard to bring up the keyframes and we'll come into the graph editor you select that channel or that you know that parameter and you see all the keyframes here and we want to be able to write an expression that allows us to react this correctly so what we're going to do is alt click the stopwatch for slider so we're going to do is type in linear open parentheses value okay comma and you'll expect these keyframes real quick so you see that there's a book of keyframes here at the bottom we find that you know there's about 20 units as you hover over them so you type in 20 you come here to the top let's see what units we get so we'll say 50 comma 50 so that means we're isolating the audio to react between these two values and then we'll do comma and for these next two numbers is to dictate um what percentage very like what percentage range you want to have your effect change out so i'll do 90 comma 120 because i want the cc lens effect here to go from 90 to 120 so i'll just randomly you know to the beat of the song animate to that so then what we're going to do is open the stopwatch for size for that effect and we'll pick whip this to our slider channel so now any effect that we parent to this audio effect that we did here it will sync to that beat so you might have to create multiple variations of this so for example you know we want to react a different effect so let's say we want to animate our logo so what i would just do is take this effect and duplicate the audio amplitude layer you know go back into that expression so we know for a scale maybe we don't want the scale to go lower than 80 and we don't want to go past 120 so then you'll take you know your logo layer you hit s3 and keyboard for scale all click to stopwatch and you parent that to the slider so now your logo will animate to the beat of the song along with the effects so from now from here what you can do is you can stack on a variety of different effects so for example in this composition i have the invert effect that will come in once the you know the bass drops or the next portion of the song goes on i'm not i don't know things about music so i'm not going to use any terms here you know i also decided to you know animate the opacity of a glow effect so the entire composition will glow out so these are things that you have to think about when putting this together i can go on for days on this and i'm not going to but you can also animate say the brightness of the background you know over here i have an adjustment layer with a brightness and contrast effect and the same thing just being parented to one the amplitude layers so go ahead and keep that in mind when you're creating this effect you can stack all the stuff together and create something really cool so that's our video on these audio visualization techniques now you have a handful of techniques to do whatever you need to do for your you know your audio projects uh be sure to think about what effects you can be using but you're set up for success with what we've went through in this tutorial so i hope you enjoyed this video if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button we post multiple post production tutorials every single week right here on the channel you can also hit me up on my social media networks those links are below and always be creating

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 32,487

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects, After Effects Audio, After Effects Audio Visualizer, After Effects Audio Visualization, After Effects Music, After Effects Music React, After Effects Audio Reaction, After Effects SonduckFilm, SonduckFilm Tutorial, 4 Audio Visualization, Audio Visualization Techniques, Motion Graphics, Motion Graphics Tutorial

Id: GCLKPmyXGv0

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021