Apple Motion: Circular Music Visualizer Tutorial

hi this is simon from tokyo productions and welcome to another tutorial for motion 5 and today we're going to be looking at techniques for creating a circular music visualizer that a lot of you have asked about so this is what it's going to look like okay so first of all I need to apologize for still working in motion 5.2 but to move over to 5.3 would cause a huge amount of disruption so I hope you can live with 5.2 for the purposes of this tutorial there are really no significant differences in 5.3 other than the ugly interface so it really shouldn't make too much difference to you okay so first of all let's have a look at our project properties I'm going to make it 30 seconds long and the size is 1920 1080 you obviously want to make it as long as your music track is going to be but this is going to be good enough for my purposes so next I'm going to come over to the file browser and I'm going to grab my music track and I'm going to just drag it into the layers pane here and if I came over to my audio timeline you can see the track down there okay let's close that all up again and our first step is to create a rectangle so come down here to the rectangle tool and just going to draw a random rectangle like that because then we're going to come over to the inspector and set it up properly so I'm going to click on the geometry tab open up the size I'm going to set the width to 5 and the height to 100 I'm going to come over to properties I'm going to Center it up and I want to set the anchor point to the top of this rectangle so I'm going to enter a value of 50 bearing mind of course that my rectangle is a hundred pixels high then what I'm going to do is come to objects replicate and my first step is going to be to change the shape to a circle and set the arrangement to outline then we want to come down here and turn on the aligned angle switch next we want to set the number of points to 110 okay so our next step is going to be to chop this up into five segments because what I'm going to do is I'm going to mirror this effect down the middle so I only need to build one side and there'll be five segments on that side and they'll be mirrored on the left-hand side so in order to make my first segment I'm going to come over to the opacity here and I'm going to click on the top and I want to set that location to 10% and the opacity down to zero and then I want to click on the first tab there and come to interpolation constant let me just turn off the just item tool so we can see a bit better what's happening so there you go I've got a segment that is a tenth of the overall circumference of the circle now I just need to align it to the top here and to do that I need to enter an offset of minus 25 you can see that's now starting the top and starting to move round the circle in this direction clockwise so my next step is to add an audio behavior to this and what I want to do is I'll add the audio behavior to the Y scale so I'm going to twirl open the scaled properties here and we've set the Y down to 5% initially and then I'm going to right click add parameter behavior audio I just want to set the ceiling to 0.25 and I want to add the music track so I'll select it from this drop down menu here or you could open up the [Music] would you timeline and drag it in from there like so okay let's click up the audio timeline again let's see what's happening there I want to set the scale to 0.25 and then what I want to do is I want to come back to my replicator cell - elephant scale randomness and so on there hello scale end I'm going to select the Y value right click add parameter behavior link and what I'm going to do is I'm going to link it to this same replicator cell so I'm going to take a rectangle that's that one here and drag it into the source object well there and under compatible parameters I'm going to select object scale Y that's the one where we've attached the audio so now if we press play we've got something a little bit more random so what I also want to do to add a little bit more life to it is take the link scale value and also link it to that Y scale of the object I know it sounds confusing but just bear with me so select the scale right click add parameter behavior link again well drag in the rectangle there that's this one here not the replicator just the repto rectangle which is the replicator cell and again we're going to come to object scale Y and now if you look at this scale value here as I play just just watch observe this scale value you can see it's being driven up and down by the same scale value and it's made a little bit more of an interesting shape here if I turn that link that second link on and off you can see the difference that's made is to added that extra randomness it'll look a little bit more lively and interesting so before we move on there's something we need to do which is to come to the audio behavior there select that and I want to add this source audio well to a rig so it doesn't really matter what kind of rig we use we're literally just using this for one purpose and one purpose only so I'm going to select a checkbox and now that is in the rig there this checkbox rig and what I'm going to call this is track changer because once we've built up our five frequency bands they're all appear in this one rig here and it'll be easy to swap out the track I'll explain that a little bit later but bear with me for now okay so let's call this high because that's our high frequencies and we need to do one other thing which is come to over to the audio here and what I want to do is I want to publish the low and the high frequency and again I'll explain why in just one second so I'll select the low frequency publish and select the high frequency publish and then if we come to our project pane here you can see those two values are now in my project and I can access them from here and set it all up so what I'm going to do is select the low frequency and set that to 5,000 Hertz so that's 5 K so this will now be genuinely being driven just by those frequencies by those frequencies above 5,000 Hertz which are pretty high okay now we've done our basic set up the rest is fairly easy so I'm going to select the replicator here right click duplicate I'm going to call this one high mid I'm going to come to the offset value here and what we need to do is we need to move it 10% we need to adjust its offset by 10% so what we're going to do is add 10% to the Val offset value the moment it's minus 25 so adding 10% to that gives us minus 15 and you'll see that we've got that segment there continuing on ok now what we need to do is open it all up and come to the audio here and let's again publish these frequencies so select the low frequency publish select the high frequency publish and let's come over to the project and what I want to do here is I want to create an overlap of the frequencies so the low frequency I'm going to set down to a thousand but the high frequency I'm going to set to 6000 so you'll see there's an overlap between my first low frequency and my second high frequency and what that just does this gives it a better smoothing between these spans they can look a bit sort of steppy and strange if you don't do that but release is up to you and one of the reasons for publishing it like this is that you can very easily come back in and just the frequencies depending on your track okay so that's our high made sausage let's select high mid let's right-click duplicate let's call this mid again we want to come to the offset and we want to add 10% so minus 15 now add 10% that makes that minus 5 ok and we've added a segment here again we want to open up come to the audio and again we just want to publish these frequencies so low frequency publish high-frequency publish and again come to our project pain so I'm going to set the low frequency to 500 this time and the high frequency to 1,100 so moving right along let's select our mage right click duplicate and let's call this low mid again we want to adjust the offset so we want to add 10% so adding 10% to minus 5 gives us +5 gain let's come to our audio here let's select the low frequency publish and let's say let's select the high frequency and publish and come back over to our project pane the low frequency this time I'm going to set to 50 and the high frequency to 600 again you can see my previous low frequency was 500 and my new high frequency is 600 so we've again got that 100 Hertz overlap and we are ready for our final segment so right click duplicate let's call this one low and again let's add 10% to our offset so that's 15% and now we've got our semicircle and you probably remember that we would come to our audio and publish these two frequency bands so low frequency publish and high frequency publish come over to our project below I'm going to set as low as it'll go which is 11 Hertz and our previous low frequency was 50 Hertz so let's go for 60 Hertz for the high frequency so there one thing I omitted to do is that what I should have done is made this circle a little bit wider I should have gone for a radius of 250 so I'm just going to quickly run through each of those and reset that so 250 in each case just gives us a slightly better larger circle will suit my design better so there you go sorry to have not done that in the first place so there we go okay so we've got half our circle I'm going to close that group down and call it right and then to get our left-hand circle I'm simply going to select that right click make clone layer again harnessing the power of clones so I'm going to call this group left and all we need to do here is come to the rotation to all that open selected Y and enter a value of 180 there you go we've got our visualizer and that really is pretty simple as you can see and just talked to you about this rig here you'll see that because we've been duplicating those layers we've got those 5 audio behaviors now stacked up inside this rig and that makes it much easier to swap out on a music track so if I come to my audio panel here audio timeline come over to my file browser I'm going to bring in a different music track bring that into here and to turn off my original music track come to my track change your rig come to the inspector and all I need to do is grab this second this new music track called dark beats I just drag it in into each of those five source wells and you can probably see as I'm doing that the visualizer is changing and then [Music] now you're probably thinking well that's cool we could just use this checkbox to switch between those two music tracks well it certainly updates the source Wells but it doesn't actually update the music track no matter whether we change the music track down here or not so the only way of updating it is as I say to drag the music track back into these source Wells ignore the fact that we've got a rig that supposedly ought to be able to change them so I'm just going to drag my original music track back into those source well so you can see again that it's updating this time wasn't updating when we flip the rig around so I don't that's too hard a way of swapping out your music track it's certainly a lot easier than going in to each of the audio behaviors and switching it out from there okay so let's close down off music timeline and let's have a look at stylizing this just a little bit first of all I want to come to my left-hand group there and I want to make a new group so objects new group and I'm just going to throw those two into there so I can affect them jointly come over to the library once you grab filters color correction levels edits that group and while I'm here I'm going to scroll down to the glow section and add a glint above the levels so I'm going to come over to the levels I'm going to select the blue and I'm going to grab this white out value that's this right hand tab at the bottom there just drag it down till we've got something like that quite like that and then let's have a look at our glint okay let's first of all set the number of streets to two and just want to reduce this down a bit to all that crazy let's go forward glint size of one and maybe just reduce the exposure down to one so that's probably quite like that let's have a look at it from the beginning yes I like that okay the next thing I'm going to do is come down and I'm going to look for my rectangle here that's the rectangle we originally used to create the Replicators go over to the shape style and I want to select fill mode gradient Earnest open up the gradient editor here click on the left-hand color and let's set that to white like that click on the left-hand color and let's move that over towards that just very very slightly yellow and then let's move that to the middle and let's hold down the alt or option key and drag that left-hand tab all the way to the end there and bring it in maybe just a little bit I think you can see what I'm trying to do and try to brighten up these tips here so as I drag that towards the middle that's just brightening the tips and if I drag this one a bit warm or towards the middle I'm brightening up this area here so now if we have a look at that it's a little bit more interesting I think objects could have reduced this window in a little bit more don't work without quite so extreme in actual fact that color doesn't need to be yellow it needs to be grey like that because the colorization is being taken care of by the levels up here so we can just use gray values for this and it's actually bred a lot more effective okay so I'm going to come to the library I'm going to come to generators and I'm going to look for lens flare and I'm going to drag it into the top here come to the inspector I'm going to increase the size quite a bit till that you can see that ring is more or less touching the edge I want to reduce this streak intensity down to zero no interested in streak then I want to come down here and select the circle mask tool I'm going to hold on the shift and alt or option key and drag out from the center till I've got a mask something like that come use your properties and Center it up come back to the mask itself let's reduce the feather amount till we've got something like that and let's come back over to our lens flare itself let's add a very small amount of yellow to the center like that then what I want to do is I want to link the intensity to our overall music track but I want to link it to the low value so that's going to be there the kick drum so I'm going to right click on intensity add perm to behavior link and I'm going to set select the rectangle inside that low replicator there you see that one just there drag that in source parameter object scale Y and now if we press play [Music] you can see that's being driven by the the kick-drum where we can do just to get a bit more intensity is to increase the scale let's go for maybe three possibly even four and see how that plays yep I like that I think that's pretty good another thing I'd like to do is take this group here I'm going to call it visualizer and I went to right click make clone layer I want to can do this one is I'm going to increase the scale let's go for something like two hundred and fifty something like that now we reduce the opacity down to one then I'm going to come over to the library filters come up to blur grab the zoom blur and add that to the clone layer like that come over to the inspector and let's just increase that till we get something like that more or less disappeared there but that's what I want I want this effect of it just being triggered when it's quite loud so I get these quite nice rays that radiates off like that on the heavier beats one final thing we could do is to add in a background so let's come over to the library content images it's going to use the search here to look for concrete and let's go for concrete one I think let's drag it in down here at the bottom come to inspector properties let's set scale to a hundred percent let's come over to the library it's clear that search result come up two filters color correction levels that come to the inspector let's reduce the white out value a lot here again let's grab the blue value and reduce that down let's come to the RGB increase the black value a lot and we get to something like that is quite nice I think maybe even reduce that white value down a bit more just so you could just a hint of a background quite like that I'd probably not have the radiating cloned on this one if we can have it on the background or alternatively you could grab this circular mask come and see come down to the concrete command V and now we've only got our texture behind our so leave central lens there or we could invert it so we're not seeing anything behind the lens though lots of possibilities what I might also do is take the visualizer group there right click make clone layer come to the library blur Gaussian blur add that come to the inspector have a nice and fat Gaussian blur amount something like that and let's just reduce the opacity of this down to about 50% or something and you can see what I'm trying to do there so just try to give it a little bit of a the glow so it looks like it's sitting in the scene a little bit more you could even duplicate that clone layer and come to the Gaussian blur and a have a much larger amount so 400 say and again just reduce the opacity down to 15 or something so you can see those two so just help its it into the two scene a little bit better [Music] [Music] so hopefully as plenty of ideas there for you to play with oh that's been interesting one thanks very much indeed for watching and I hope to see you again another time

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 35,221

Keywords: Music, visualizer, Motion, circle, circular, hints, tips, techniques

Id: cyfewt_nmSE

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2017