How to create Reactive Audio Spectrum Waveform Effects in Adobe After Effects (Tutorial)

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone my name is Justin OD show and in this Adobe After Effects CC tutorial I'm going to show you how you can create audio spectrums and waveforms that react to sound and music so let's go to our composition menu and open up a new composition I'll just use a 1920 by 1080 black composition and I also have a music audio file that I'm going to drag into this project so there's the track I've dragged it on the timeline and now we're gonna create a new solid so let's go to layer new solid because here's where we're gonna create the waveform on to so by default you should have this dark gray solid and then if you head over to effect generate there's actually two options that you could play around with there's audio spectrum which is gonna give us more of that graph and spectrum type of look or there's also audio waveform which is more like a zigzaggy wave form as you see here so for this tutorial we're going to use the audio spectrum and we're going to be building off of this so the first thing we want to do when we generate this line is you notice there's no movement so we have to go over to the effect controls for the dark gray solid and the first thing you want to do is set which audio track you want it to react to so since we dragged that audio layer in the composition you can see we can choose the song name which is called you like it mp3 so now you see it automatically starts reacting to the sound of that music however the default settings are pretty basic pretty boring so I'll show you how all these other controls work and how we can stylize and customize it a bit so the start and end point is basically the start and end point of this line so you could see if I pull this back it stretches it out if I pull the end point forward in the exposition it stretches that out also you have the Y position as well so I'll just leave it as a straight line next you also have the option to set it on a custom path so if you go over to your pen tool for example and draw out whatever path you wanted you could make it a line to that path so you could now see mask 1 you'll see that the waveform is now on that custom shape path that we made so that can also be useful but I'm not going to do that in this case polar path also kind of warps it around the center but there's better ways to do that as well so I don't usually check that so delete that mask and now let's check out some of the other things we do so starting frequency and adding frequency is going to consider what sound range is in the music or audio file to consider to display so basically the starting frequency is zero basically nothing and that's the left side and the end frequency is how high pitch do you want it to consider so you see it's kind of considered like zooming in or out so the more you zoom in you see the closer it gets the higher frequency you consider the more it zooms out and things kind of get pushed over because your song or audio might not even include all these frequencies so you want to find a range that fits nice amounts of waveforms in between so I'll use just about one to a thousand and you could play around with it for your audio file next we have the amount of frequency bands that we want to use so these are the lines and right now the default is 64 but if we raise that up you can see we can create a lot more bands eventually making it completely solid which can also look cool and we can also lower it so that they're more spaced out just like some dots so that's also up to your preference I'll leave it pretty decent and then maximum height is probably one of the most important ones right now you can see things aren't really jumping up and down too much which is why we can increase the maximum height so you can get a lot more visible jumpiness you just want to don't want to go too crazy to the point where things are getting cut off your screen and it looks off and next we have audio duration in milliseconds which also considers how much to display so the shorter in you get the more movement you're going to get but the more duration you want to display it's kind of going to look less synchronized and I would only adjust this one slightly in or out if you want to get some fine-tuning for it next you have audio offset which is if you wanted to have a delay between this and the music for some reason I'm not going to do that because I want them to be synchronized perfectly so I'll leave it at 0 thickness is how thick you want these bars to be so you can see thicker not as thick also up to you next you have the softness which you could see as I get thicker it starts to get all fuzzy-looking so you can turn the softness down or up up to your preference so I'll leave it right around 50 anyway now you have the inside and outside color of choice so pink is the default but you can make it whatever starting color you want so I can do it bright blue and the outside color I can do even even lighter cyan looking color now you have the hue interpolation so right now it's at zero but if we wheel this up you can see it starts to introduce different colors so this is one full rotation of the hue wheel which means we get the entire color spectrum or wheel introduced and if we continue to wheel it in you'll see that it introduces the whole spectrum over and over and over it starts to look like a rainbow so if we pull that back around and we only have about 60 to 100 degrees of rotation you see it just starts to pull in some other colors that are close to the blue and cyan which is green in this case so dynamic hue phase is if you play the animation you'll see that it started kind of animates the color as well so you can leave that on or off up to your preference if it's off the color just kind of stays overlapped on top doesn't really react with anything also you have color symmetry you see right now it's symmetrical from the middle if you turn that off it's more like a left to right lastly you have some display options so this is what digital display looks like you can also do analog lines which kind of gives you more in that waveform feel again and you can also do analog dots which is another cool one it does dots that kind of dance and bounce up and down for the side options you have either the symmetrical side a and B you can do just side a for that classic equalizer look or you could do side B only for kind of like a reverse equalizer so I kind of like the classic side a equalizer look however let's customize it and stylize it a bit from our basic now that we know what all these tools do so let's adjust a few things let's adjust the frequency bands to make them a little bit spaced out let's also change the display options back to digital and in this case I'm going to turn the softness all the way down and also turn the thickness just about to my liking I'm kind of just looking for a nice balance between the positive and negative space between these lines so now that I have something decent to start with I can actually apply effects on top of this to continue so a cool trick you can do is you can go over to the transitions effects and you can find one called and blinds this is one that's in After Effects or Premiere Pro and what it does when you drag it on is it allows you to adjust the transition completion to have a bit of a blinds opening and closing effect but right now they're going straight up and down which we don't want so let's take the direction and let's make it 90 degrees which would be side to side so now you can see it slices these lines side to side but you kind of want to find a balance between the positive and negative space again so you have a nice-looking block or dots and you can also adjust the width to play around with how thick you want the blocks to be so get a nice balance of positive and negative space and you can play it back a couple times and go back and forth between these and see if certain things will look better or worse and if you want to create a ring which you often see like a ring audio spectrum you can play around with the distortion so instead of using that polar path which kind of looks funny as you see it doesn't really look good we can go to the distort effects and add a polar coordinates displacement onto the solid layer and set it to rectangular to polar change the interpolation to 100% and now if we go back up to our audio spectrum we could play around the start and end points so that things meet up more properly I'll switch the side from A to B in this case since we distorted it with the polar coordinates and you can see now we have kind of like a ring of audio spectrum and there's tons of different ways you can customize this and play around with it but now that I've shown you some options and potential I'll let you experiment I'll set you loose with this if you guys did like this video definitely leave a like on it below let me know saw in the comments and maybe in future videos I'll play around the audio waveform a bit more so follow me on instagram at justin OD show all my other social media is linked as well once again thank you guys so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Justin Odisho

Views: 2,046,712

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Id: iJimO9Oftqo

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2017