Audio Waveform + Audio Spectrum | Effects of After Effects

[Music] audio waveform and audio spectrum can both be found under the generate category and because they're generative effects they're going to need something to generate on top of so i'm going to start by making a new solid layer and i'll call this audio and then just click ok and let's start with audio waveform i'll click and drag that out to the solid layer and we have a beam running across between two point controls now in addition to needing a layer to display this effect it also needs an audio layer to drive the visuals so the first option here is audio layer and i'm going to just click on that and go to this layer right at the bottom which is a stock music track so i'll just click on that and then down here in the layers i'm going to double tap the l key so i can see the actual audio waveform of this song and then i'll preview this audio by pressing the period key on my number pad so this is what we're going to be working with and right away up here you can see that my effect is reacting to this audio waveform now this is a little hard to see so i'm going to jump straight into the display controls and go to the thickness and just make this thicker so this controls the stroke width basically of this line and then we have the inside and outside color which obviously looks really bad on this green background so let me just sample my yellow color here i'll select the inside color to be yellow and leave it at that for now get rid of my logo and zoom in nice and close so you can see that this beam is made up of two different colors that fade into each other so i can change this to be anything i want and kind of make it look glowy and i even have a softness property right here to make that second color more feathered or less feathered for the style i want i'm going to take the softness all the way down and i'm going to turn both colors to be that yellow so it's just a solid stroked line basically all right now that it's easier to look at let's play it back in real time and see what it looks like so pretty cool looking effect and if i just scrub through here at the beginning you can tell that it's traveling basically forward in time kind of like the timeline where everything is scrolling from right to left but i can change this to any direction i want just by moving these point controls so i could move one to the bottom of the comp one to the top of the comp and now it's going to travel from the top to the bottom so that's completely customizable i'm going to undo back to the default state so i think that makes the most sense and then let's jump to this property right here displayed samples it's defaulted to 120 but this is basically the resolution of our visual waveform so from this point to this point is one sample and the next line is another sample the next line is another sample all the way down if i lower this then we're going to have less samples displayed in the waveform and it's going to be less detailed when i play it back but if i go in the opposite direction and really crank this number up then it's going to be very hard to see all those segments and it's going to seem much more analog so you can use this value to really crank up the detail or lower it down to make it seem more digital i like the look of having a lot more samples so i'm going to keep that up around 800. next is the maximum height so this is basically the amplitude of this waveform so if you just increase it everything is going to get taller so i'm going to fill out my comp a little bit with that next up are the audio duration and audio offset and these are both measured in milliseconds the audio duration is the amount of audio that's being displayed between the start and end points so right now it's 125 milliseconds but i could increase this up and it's basically squashing the amount of audio that fits between those two points or i could go in the opposite direction and display less so if i went down to say 60 milliseconds and played back then it's going to be a lot less easy to tell that this is actually traveling along this line and not just being a static waveform but if i go in the opposite direction and crank this up to say 240 milliseconds then it's very obvious that this is audio traveling from right to left the next property is audio offset in milliseconds so what i'm going to do is hold down the control key to make smaller adjustments to this number and then click and drag and you can see that this is just offsetting the sampled time for this waveform so this is a good way to get the waveform to be exactly timed and placed in your comp where you want it to be let me undo that we've already taken a look at the thickness this just controls how thick the line is as well as the softness again that's the softness of the line next up we have random seed and in parentheses analog and this analog is referring to the display options we're currently displaying as analog lines but we could change that to analog dots and then if i zoom in here you see that it's replaced those lines with just points at the extreme values of each sample i'll play this and that random seed will just randomize those intermediate dots a little bit and it also applies to analog lines so it just changes where it's pulling those samples from a little bit but the third display option is digital and this is slightly different if i turn my display samples down so we can see each individual line the digital display is going to give you just these vertical lines so instead of the analog lines where it's connecting one sample to the next digital is just representing the amplitude of each sample with a vertical line so it's just a little bit different of a look now jumping back up to this part of the controls we have this path property and it's defaulted to none what this is referring to is a mask path so if i were to grab the ellipse tool and then click and drag or holding shift to make a mask that's a perfect circle and let go i'll change it from add to none and then go into my path options and change this to mask 1. now my audio waveform is being wrapped around this circle and if i turn my display height down a little bit and maybe change the display options back to analog lines and increase those displayed samples my waveform now plays back in this radial way so that just gives it a very cool and unique look and maybe i want to increase the audio duration so that i see more of it within that circle but this is a really easy way of making very unique looking waveforms because it doesn't have to be a circle you can modify this path to be whatever you want any shape it could be a logo and this effect will just wrap the waveform around it now i'm going to change that back to none and get rid of my mask and then turn my display samples down so i can see those lines a little bit more clearly and then i'm going to duplicate this effect and change this instance to being displayed as analog dots instead i want to increase the thickness so i can see those dots nice and clearly now if i come down to this last checkbox which is composite on original it's going to take all the transparent pixels and blend them on top of whatever was before it so now i have dots on top of lines and i've made another very unique looking waveform i could even change the color so if i change this to white for the inside and outside color now i have a very unique looking two-toned waveform and to link up all of these properties i'm just going to press e on the keyboard grab this effect and say edit copy with property links and then select the second instance of the effect and paste it so they're now all linked up identically with expressions but i'll go into those effects and disable the expression for analog lines the display options change that back to dots and then do the same thing for the inside and outside color take those off change them back to white and then the thickness as well disable that expression and make them thicker and i can't forget to also unlink the expression for composite on original so that i can enable that and now just the properties that i want access to to control the design of those dots are unlocked but everything else is completely linked up to the first instance so i can move these points around and both instances are going to react to them i could even increase or decrease the samples the maximum height whatever i want to do and it's always going to stay linked up together all right that's everything for audio waveform i'm just going to collapse this layer up duplicate it and then hide the original and then remove these two effects from it and we'll move over to audio spectrum so we'll apply that effect and most of the controls carry over from audio waveform so just like before i need to select my audio layer as the source so i'll do that i'll change the colors to be the same yellow that i had before i'll increase the height and increase the thickness of those lines so you can already start to see what's visually different about this audio spectrum versus audio waveform the most obvious being that it looks like the digital lines right if we look at the display options it's set to digital i can change this to analog lines or analog dots just like before but the reason it's defaulted to digital is because if i play this back now instead of this audio traveling from one point to the other it's actually showing us a spectrum of frequencies from point a to point b and the height of the line is representative of how intense that particular frequency is so the lower frequencies are on the left end and the higher frequencies are on the right end so at the beginning when these drums are starting up there's more energy on the lower ends of the frequencies than the higher ends of the frequencies and that's the main difference between the two effects but let's go through all these controls and see what else is a little bit different start and end points are the same the path options are the same so i could map this to a mask just like before but then we have this option for use polar path so i'm actually going to make another mask set it to none and choose that as the path source if i check use polar path then everything changes and it's all coming out of the top first point and that's because it works a little bit differently instead of wrapping around the entire mask it's taking a single point and wrapping around it radially so it's basically doing what i was trying to with this mask to show you what i mean i'm going to delete this mask and i'm just going to draw an open mask with two points like that and then choose that as the mask path now wherever this first point is is where the spectrum is going to wrap itself around anything after that first point won't matter if i right click on this point and go into mask and shape path and say set first vertex then it's going to snap to that vertex instead so that's what use polar path is for i don't need to do that though so i'm going to reset that get rid of my mask so we're back to this linear spectrum the next two controls are the bandwidth basically of what we're visualizing so we're setting a starting frequency for how low we go on the left end and an end frequency for how high we're visualizing this spectrum so i could trim this down to not include as many frequencies and then we're going to get a lot more activity because we're just looking at this lower end or i could go the other direction and include a lot more of the spectrum which in turn reduces how much activity we're going to see unless i go to the frequency bands and increase that just like in the audio waveform with the displayed samples think of it kind of like the resolution of this spectrum i'm going to set the ending frequency back to its default and keep the frequency bands higher i'm going to turn the thickness down so we see a little bit more detail in this spectrum and then really crank that frequency bands up so now we have something that looks a lot more clean and responsive to the actual frequencies in this spectrum we also have audio duration and audio offset controls these work exactly the same as the audio waveform so it's adjusting how much of that audio we're visualizing in the spectrum and allowing us to offset which portion of that audio we're visualizing we've looked at the thickness and the softness as well as the inside and outside colors but next up we have blend overlapping color and this is actually going to need multiple colors so i'm going to change the outside color to something completely different so let's say blue click ok and then check this blend overlapping colors if i turn the frequency bands down lower it's not going to have any effect but as soon as they start running into each other that's what blend overlapping color is four it just blends the two together let me change that back to yellow and i'll uncheck blend overlapping color the next option is hue interpolation and this one is really interesting if i increase this value it's going to shift the hue of our spectrum if i go all the way around to one revolution then starting in the center of our frame it's going to shift the hue one full revolution in each direction and that's because we have this color symmetry checkbox enabled if i uncheck that then it's going to go from the left to the right so if i turn this back down you can see that the left side is staying yellow and everything past that is getting the hue shift with color symmetry enabled it's going to start at the center of my spectrum and go equally in both directions now with this dynamic hue phase checkbox what it's going to do is apply this hue shift to basically the maximum frequency so wherever it's most intense is where it's going to start the hue shift from so if i go to this frame right here where basically nothing nothing's happening see that the yellow is right at this point but if i go forward a little bit to where we get a little bit more excitement that yellow color is shifting to this point if i disable that dynamic hue phase then the hue is not going to change it's basically just overlaying this crazy gradient over top of this spectrum and nothing shifts around so that's what the dynamic hue phase is for all right let's go to the display options we've been looking at it in digital this whole time but we can change that to analog lines if i turn the frequency bands down again that's what it looks like as well as analog dots just like before i'm going to keep that at digital crank those frequency bands up again and then we have the side options right now it's side a and b but if i change this to side a we're just going to get the top half of the spectrum side b the bottom half of the spectrum or keep them combined next up is duration averaging and this is basically a way to smooth out all of your spectrums so that it just looks a little less chaotic so if i turn those frequency bands down and just check that off and back on you can see that it's really just smoothing everything out so it's not so chaotic and it just gives it a little bit different of a look finally we have this composite unoriginal which since i don't have any other effects on it's just going to bring back the black solid i applied it to but you could use that the exact same way as i did with the audio waveform stacking a couple of these on top of each other these two effects are fantastic for making audio visualizers and any graphic that's responsive to audio they're very powerful very customizable and a lot of fun to play with but that's everything you need to know about audio waveform and audio spectrum hey thanks for watching if you enjoyed this tutorial then check out the other ones here on my youtube channel and if you like my teaching style then definitely check out my longer form content on skillshare and school of motion and if you want to support more tutorials like this one check out my patreon you can find links for all that stuff in the description of this video [Music] you

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 1,759

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: 1MCQ2JvExyE

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021