Audio Spectrum Waveform Effect in Resolve 16 (Tutorial)

hello everybody chris here and in this video i'm going to be showing you guys how to create a visualizer based on audio waveform inside of davinci resolve 16. so this is going to be a moderately complex tutorial and it's going to require a party plugin we'll get into that in a minute to get things started let's do effects library go to effects and create a new fusion composition so i will drag this somewhere onto the timeline and then we'll go into it on the fusion page in order to edit it so the audio waveform node which we're going to use in order to get information from a audio clip is not available out of the box so we need to use a tool called reactor in order to get that plug-in install and use it with the end result so i'm going to put a link to the reactor plug-in which is free which helps you to get extra tools that you can use within davinci resolve such as the audio waveform so look for that link in the description so once you have reactor installed and if you need help on how to do that and to get it working there's another video on my channel on how to install plug-ins with reactor but once you have it installed we can go up to workspace and then scripts and then we can find reactor and open reactor in order to install the audio waveform plug-in so from the reactor interface we want to find audio waveform it's close to the top so you find it and then you can just go ahead and click this little check box and once you close out a fusion reactor it'll recommend that you restart resolve before we actually get started with things so once you've done all that you can right click go to add tool and you'll find audio waveform under fuses so audio waveform is right here and with this you'll need to enter a wav file so basically take any song and convert it into a dot wave you can use programs like audacity to do that the limitation that i've ran into is that the file size needs to be under 50 megabytes so if you run into file size issues what you can do is split up your fusion composition into two separate clips and have your part one of your song end where the second part starts up and then just put them side by side in the timeline aside from that though you can just browse to find the wav file on your computer so i'm going to find beauty flow by kevin mcleod convert it oh wait actually the one minute test version i have because of file size issues so i converted it inside of audacity not hard to do it you just bring an mp3 in and you export as a wave for however much audio information you need and once you have that in here it's going to be able to create a audio waveform based on that information so i'm going to preview this at the top left and if we hit play we'll be able to see the audio information showing up here on the left based on how loud the information coming in is but this doesn't look exactly how we had at the start of the video so with this tool we can represent the audio waveforms in different ways but if you want to do an audio spectrum we can go over to the spectrum tab of audio waveform node and then check spectrum and we'll get a very different look on this instead the waves will be coming out of the bottom so currently it is a rough line but if we change the appearance to i believe we want needles then we'll get these little lines that go straight up based on how loud each of the audio channels are so if we hit play it'll look like this to get a lot more of these little needles coming up what i did is i changed the fft to 2048 so now it looks a lot more like this now you also notice that these needles are peeking all the way to the top of the screen so what we can do to make that smaller is to actually lower the scale down so i'm going to make it let's see something like 0.3 and hit play still kind of too high so i'll lower the scale here to 0.1 and we'll hit play one more time see if that looks good for how we actually want it to be another thing you might notice once fusion starts rendering out some of the frames is that as it is right now your lines are going to go kind of crazy so if you don't want it to render the needles completely at every single frame in its entirety then what you can turn on is a setting called steady wave so when you do this it's going to be averaging the frames together a little bit in order to get how it displays so i think i have the frame count at five if we go back and we hit play now then the movement is going to be a lot smoother it'll look like it's crazy and i think that's what we want on the layout tab over here i believe i also increased the thickness of each line so let's go ahead and try doing that so that these lines are kind of grouped together a little bit more so if we go back and we hit play we can see if that looks a little bit more like what we want and we can also change the color of the line so let's go ahead and lower the red and green a bit so we can get something in between a blue or turquoise color or really you can set it to whatever you actually want it to be okay now with this audio waveform we're going to use it as the base visuals at the bottom of our screen but i also want to use a setting called the elongation in order to determine the values of some things we're going to set later on so for instance we'll take the logo and we'll have its size bounce a bit depending on how strong the volume is so using that elongation setting we can add that to the size and make it louder and make it larger when the audio is loud and then keep it small when the audio is soft but if we check elongation on here which is necessary to get that value okay so for this elongation setting we don't actually want the bar here to show through on the media output and since we're going to just take this out of your waveform and use it visually what we can do instead is to copy it over to another position so i'm going to ctrl c copy that node and paste it down here and i'll rename this with f2 and call it elongation waveform and then i'm going to take the top waveform and i'm going to turn elongation off so instead when we want to use the elongation value we'll be using it from this elongation waveform and we can add that in any mathematical expression we want so next i want to take a logo or any image that you want the size to bounce with the beat and you can right click and add it with add tool and out and loader so loader you find a file on your computer you want to use so i'll go here to logos and i'll pick davinci resolve so we're going to need to modify the size of the logo when it displays on screen so i'm going to right click go to add tool transform and we'll add a transform node which will include the scale value so let's go ahead and connect this here and then we can show this on the right preview window okay well that's not going to help right there so much so we might actually want to preview the media out but let's add a merge node so right click add tool composite merge since we're going to be merging the audio waveform with this logo and feeding that to media out so this will be the background we'll load in the audio waveform here and then we'll connect this to media out and use the right preview i'll keep the waveform one on the left preview the it's a minor issue here the output frame is being set to the size of the image so what we can do to fix that is actually to swap the waveform to be the background in this merge so we need to connect the waveform to be the yellow connector here so i'm going to disconnect these connect the audio waveform here and then the image will be the foreground instead so doing that we get our images properly combined here okay so cool that's kind of what we want so now what we need to do is set up an expression to control the size on the transform for this logo so i'm going to right click here on size and we are going to modify this with an expression so when we do that we can go over to the modifiers tab and we'll have the ability to set numbers down here so i'm going to take the number in 1 and i'm going to set that to 1. so the default size is going to be one and then we'll add whatever the elongation value is into number two and combine those two numbers so in number two we right click that and we connect it with elongation waveform elongation so now depending on what frame we're at this number two is gonna have a different value so let's go over to the second tab here the number expression and then we need to add the numbers together so we have the number in number one here so we put in one to represent that in the expression and then into for number two so really simple here n1 plus and two and that's going to get us the size value so if we go back over to the tools tab you can see that this size value is being modified depending on what frame one so if we hit play now we can see that that elongation value is modifying the size of our logo now this is in super slow-mo because it's rendering but if we go back to the start and we hit play we can see that it is bouncing quite nicely now if that's too much or too little for you all you could do is go over to the modifiers tab go to over here and you could multiply this into by a third value so you could do let's say n2 in parentheses times number three and then we just need to put in a value for number three so if you go over here to this tab now we can have number three be the elongation multiplier so if you want it to be twice the elongation effect then you do two there and now it's going to bounce twice as much based on that elongation value so if you want the logo to bounce a lot then you can do that though this might be a little crazy actually it looks kind of nice so we might just go with that i think so that's half of everything done already now if we want to add particles to it we can just control the force of the particles with that elongation value just like we controlled the size here so let's set up a particle system so let's start with a particle emitter and let's add in a particle renderer somewhere after that and then this particle renderer will become the background of a second merge so i'm going to right click add tool do composite merge and so the particle render is going to be the background and let's break this merge one the merge one here it will be the new foreground and we connect that to media out so now we have particles added in which have no force currently okay so for right now we don't want to see the finished result let's just put renderer one on the right so we can actually see those particles so right now they're just spawning in the middle there and they last for about 100 frames each we're going to want the lifespan to go way down that'll help with performance but also help to emphasize the music because if you see the particles for 100 100 frames not milliseconds then it will be kind of hard to tell when they came from so i think a lower lifespan is better here next for them to actually come out from the center they need to have some kind of force so let's right click on the line here add tool go down to particles and then let's do a tangent force so this will make them kind of come out from the center based on a certain force value and now forces by default keep applying to the particles for their entire life span but we can go over to this second tab here for tangent force and we can actually make it so that the tangent force only occurs basically at the first frame by setting it to 0.1 so the age of the particle determines whether or not it gets that force so since we set the end age to 0.1 that means it's only going to be applying the tangent force for 10 percent of its lifespan which 10 frames comes out to one frame so it's only going to be applying on the first frame basically now because it's not going to be adding the force consistently the force is going to need to be a lot stronger for it to look right so let's go ahead and set up an expression for this z strength on the tangent force so i'm going to right click and we'll modify with an expression we'll go over to modifiers and we can just start by making number two the elongation waveform and then number one will be let's say multiplier based on that elongation value so let's try something high i had it like at 150 or 100 before so let's start with like a hundred and now we'll go over the number expression and we'll do number two or number one times number two and that is going to give us our value so if we go to the start and we hit play we can see these particles are actually coming out far enough now but if we look at it for the full picture of 1920 pixels these point particles aren't really big enough to see very well so what we could do is change the type of particle which is being emitted so on particle emitter 1 we can go over to the style tab and we can change it to a brush and the one i was using before was down here a gold leaf so we can just pick one of those and that's going to change the particles into something much bigger so if we go to frame one and hit play we can see them there we might not like that particular leaf so feel free to change it into whatever you actually like here a little hard to tell it's a leaf so we might want to go into size controls and increase the size too so we could make this 0.25 making it 250 percent bigger and let's go back to the start and hit play okay it's a lot easier to tell that it's an actual leaf brush there so that might be looking good for us so in a lot of cases the particles are kind of stuck behind the logo here which is always going to be a minimum of a certain size so i'm thinking we can actually add a mask here to get better render performance so let's right click add tool go to mask and then ellipse and i'm going to connect this to the blue part of the particle render that's the effect mask so now if we invert the mask and make it something like 0.1 and 0.1 then we're going to hide basically any of the particles that are behind this logo but everything else will be displayed and i think that might make it a little bit more performant so let's see with the effect mask on and then without it on does that make any difference oh yeah okay it definitely does so let's add that ellipse back there as the effect mask so if we go to the start here and hit play after we get some of those uh frames rendered then you can see based on the elongation value these leaves are going to be coming a lot farther out or staying relatively close to the logo so in a sense like the power of the beat is going to be controlling these leaves which is pretty cool actually now i think it is a little bit crazy how much it goes right now so i might go into the tangent force find the modifier and lower the value here so as long as you set up the expression correctly all you need to do is change the numbers and you can basically get it to look however you want later on which is super cool so let's render it with a value of 80 and see how that goes there so it's rendering out there the logo and the particle system is being controlled by the elongation value on the audio waveform and then we have the audio waveform itself at the bottom so all we would need to do now is to basically go back over to the edit tab determine how long we want this clip to be make sure that it's not longer than the music clip itself otherwise you run out of music and it well it'll stop but we can take our background and we can drop it in here if we want and then the fusion composition can render on top of it but you know what i actually want to go one step further than that i want the zoom value of the underlying image to actually be controlled a little bit by the elongation too so the background image itself will bounce a bit so let's actually take this image and we'll go back into the fusion composition so fusion composition okay so what we'll want to do to add in the background to this fusion composition is to create a new merge so i'm going to right click and we'll go to add tool composite merge and all this stuff will be the foreground for this merge so i will add it in there and so for the background i'll right click and add in a tool we'll do a loader node and i'll find a background we can use on the desktop so i'll go ahead and grab this image here afterwards to control the size of it with animation we'll right click add tool transform so connect these together the image to the transform and then the transform to the yellow of the merge three so depending on the size of your background image it may look out of shape here and the media out so what we're going to want to do is after the transform we want to resize it back to the standard frame size so i'm going to right click add tool transform resize which will default to your project settings so now if we go back over to the edit tab we should be able to see the background here and everything in the frame correctly and there shouldn't be any black space so now what we can do to finally just animate that background is to once again add an expression so i'm going to right click on the size modify with and expression and then we'll go to modifiers i'll have one as the default value and then i will add that to the elongation value so connect to elongation waveform elongation go over to the second tab for number expression and then do number one plus number two and that's going to get the size there so if we go back to the store and we hit play it's going to have that size bouncing in and out now i don't know if that's going to be too extreme we can always change the values so let's wait for it to pre-render okay so that that looks like it's going to be way too much so we'll go to the modifiers and we can reduce that elongation value by a amount so so i'll multiply it by 0.2 to reduce the effect by basically 80 add some parentheses here and we'll do number two times number three so that number three is going to be multiplying it by 20 meaning reducing the value which is going to reduce its impact by 80 so it should look much more time now let's go to the start hit play and so we're going to have a little bit of bouncing there now but not too much not too crazy so in a nutshell that is how you can create a audio waveform visualizer inside of davinci resolve 16 i'm going to be trying to create a setting template um which you can just load into your own project if you don't want to go through all the steps yourself remember though you have to have reactor installed and you have to have the audio waveform plug-in but aside from that i've been chris thanks for watching and i will see you guys in my future video content

Channel: Chris' Tutorials

Views: 74,770

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve 16, blackmagic davinci resolve, resolve 16, video editor, free video editor, youtube video editor, best video editing softwares, audio spectrum, audio spectrum effect, audio effect, wav resolve, wav effect, resolve plugin, reactor, fusion, fusion effects, fusion tutorial, music, music video, music production, music effects, music video effects, how to make audio spectrum, audio visualizer, audio spectrum template, audio visualizer free

Id: 2W9EYuf6y6o

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020