How to Create REACTIVE AUDIO Visualizers in Adobe After Effects

Hey what's up everybody and welcome back to another gal tutorial today I'm going to show you how to create these reactive audio visualizations inside of Adobe After Effects. So this effect can be achieved with any type of sound file such as a voice highlight from your podcast or a musical track there are so many cool ways to customize the design style and movement of your audio spectrums and my hope is that you'll walk away from this tutorial feeling more creative and confident about making your own audio spectrum effects so after the tutorial I'd love to see what you guys create please send your designs to me on instagram my handle is @premiere_gal and before we jump in I first want to thank Envato Elements for sponsoring this video I'll tell you more about them later on but using my link below there's a special coupon that will get you 70% off your first month to access millions of stock video clips, music, Premiere templates including some really cool advanced audio visualization templates so without further ado let's go ahead and jump on in first you'll want to import the avatar or logo you are using and the audio sample into After Effects just by dragging and dropping it into the project panel first click on the new comp icon since I'll be making this for my Instagram feed I recommend using a 4 to 5 aspect ratio which is 800 by 1000 pixels if you're wondering what pixel resolution to use for a specific platform I've put my recommendations in my description box below the other important part here with the setup is the comps duration you should make the duration as long as the audio clip that you're using so I'll enter the duration of my audio clip but after you make your comp you can always click on the hamburger menu here next to the comp and go back to the settings to change the duration so now that we have our composition let's drag my avatar into the composition and let's resize it to the size that I want I think that looks great next let's drag our audio clip from the project panel into the composition we'll get to that in a bit next let's make a background layer you can certainly a place a video or a photo behind the avatar or a logo layer here in the comp but you can also make a color background I'm going to go to layer new solid and choose a deep royal blue and then I'm going to add a cool lighting change so let's go to effects and presets and search for then yet lighting and then double click to apply it and immediately you will then see that there's this really cool clean vignette around the background which looks really awesome now if you already have a circular photo you can skip this next step but if you need to make it circular for this effect simply select the layer in the composition then go up to click on the shape icon here and select the ellipses shape tool and now you can click over the photo here in drag holding shift to make a perfect circle I like to move it to the exact place simply by using the arrow keys on my keyboard so now that the image in the background is in place we need to begin making our audio react effect the first step is to make a solid layer go to layer new solid and it can be any color because the color will not be visible anyway after we apply the mask and the audio spectrum effect and now using the solid layer we're gonna draw the shape of the mask in this case we're going to draw a larger circle around the avatar but you can draw any shape that you want it can be a triangle or a star and that can be the path from which your audio visualization will animate from so let's first reduce the opacity of this solid layer so we can see the Avatar beneath it to do that hit T on your keyboard for transparency and let's drop it down so we can see the Avatar behind the solid and now with the solid layer selected go back up to the ellipses tool and we're going to draw a circular mask again but this time just a bit bigger than the profiles edges and as we toggle down from the solid we're also going to want to change the blend mode for the mask to none now it's time to apply the effect to our mask path we're going to go to effects and presets and we're going to search for audio spectrum you'll also see that there's an audio waveform effect but spectrum has more customization options which is why I prefer using it so double-click to apply the audio spectrum to the solid layer and now as we zoom in you can see there's a default pink line from here we need to go to the effect controls first we need to select an audio layer from which the spectrum effect will play from so we're going to select the audio sample clip that we put in our composition and next we can change the path to be the mask path that we just drew on the solid layer and now you can see that the dots are in a circular path so now that that is done now we're going to adjust the frequency levels you want displayed now all audio tracks will be different but since we're working with voice it's fine to make it from around 50 to 2000 Hertz you just want as much movement as possible so you can definitely play around with these numbers until you get the right movement in your line now we can further customize we can change the frequency bands this is how many lines there are so you can play around with this value until you get the right number that you want for your look in the next valuable parameter that is worth discussing is the maximum height this determines how high these bars will go next is the thickness this is how thick these frequency lines will be so play around with it you don't want it to be too thick or they will bleed too much together so if you want a thicker look you'll want to keep the frequency bands down and if you want more bands then you'll want to reduce the thickness probably closer to 2 again just play around with it until you get the look that you like next is the softness so if you crank this up all the way to a hundred percent it'll make it more fuzzy and less definite lines but in this case I'll just leave the softness at zero next for the colours you can make it any combination that you want you can choose both a custom inside and outside color so the really cool part here is the hue interpolation so if you're looking to create a rainbow spectrum this is where you make it happen if you increase this number the frequencies displayed actually rotate around the color spectrum space so the higher the number the more of the colors that you'll see and that if you want more colors you can just drag to the right to increase the hue interpolation degree more and more and it will continue to show more color and then the color spectrums begin to repeat as you see here in the composition so play around with what colors you like but for me I'm going to change the inside and outside color to white and next is time to choose between what style or display of the spectrum that you want the default here is the digital but if you want to switch to analog you'll see as I scrub through it turns into this jaggedy moving the line which is pretty cool or you can choose dots which are just a bunch of moving dots to the audio for this I'm going to keep it as a digital display next is the side option so if you choose side a it will animate inwards towards the inside of the circle path and if it's B it'll go outside and a and B is on both sides so for this I'm just going to choose B again you can choose whatever combination you like but the reason I chose B here is I'm actually going to duplicate this solid and make another audio spectrum but on site a this time so rather than creating it from scratch we're just going to go down to the composition hit command D on a Mac to duplicate it or control D on a PC now there's a duplicate here but first let's go ahead and rescale this particular spectrum down so hit s on your keyboard to bring up the scale and let's rescale this first ring to be inside of our first audio spectrum and next all we need to do is change this to a different style to add some more dynamism I'm going to choose analog but of course you could try out the dots too and I'm going to make the side-on option a so now we have an outside audio spectrum on side B and on the inside we have an analog spectrum so I encourage you to play around with the different looks and even make more duplicate copies of the waveform to have some fun now the next step is optional but if you want the avatar in the waveform to actually bounce and react to the music this is what I'm going to show you next so simply right-click on the audio file and go to keyframe assistant and select convert audio to keyframes this will create an audio amplitude layer now I'm going to toggle down under the effects here and since this is stereo we only need both channels so I'm just going to delete the right and left channels now keeping this layer open we need to select the logo and the two solids together now that they're all selected by holding shift what we can do is right-click on all of them to pre compose it to make it one layer so now it's one layer and we can hit S on our keyboard to show the scale parameters and we can hold the option key on a Mac or the Alt key if you're on a PC and you can click on the stopwatch while you're holding that key and this will activate expressions and now you're going to take the little swirly icon here click and drag it to pick with it to the slider here and what this did is it now connected the scale of this pre-comp to the animation that occurs in the audio amplitude and you'll see that the scale of the pre-comp needs to be fixed this is where we go in and simply edit the expression we need to add + left bracket 100 comma 100 and right bracket and this will bring it back to its normal scale at a hundred percent and now we have our final effect as for the other types of advanced visualizers I encourage you to explore all the different templates available in Envato elements there's pretty much a template for anything you need so just simply download the template and you can customize it drop in your audio file and customize the colors to your brand and then you're done and you can try out as many templates as you like because you can get unlimited downloads with Envato and once again thanks to Envato for sponsoring you can get 70% off your first month with my link below and yeah thank you all for watching and before you go be sure to give this video a thumbs up if it helped you out and follow me on instagram for some more fun creative updates see you all next time bye

Channel: Premiere Gal

Views: 49,896

Keywords: creative, reactive, audio, spectrum, effect, adobe after effects, tutorial, after effects 2020, visualizer, premiere gal, after effects, audio waveform, vfx tutorial, vfx, audio spectrum, audio spectrum effect, effects, after effects audio spectrum, audio visualizer, after effects tutorial, audio spectrum after effects, audio spectrum after effects tutorial

Id: 7ubpVaAyf8I

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020