How to make ANYTHING React to Music & Audio in Adobe After Effects! (CC Tutorial)

[Music] hi everyone my name is Justin OD show and in this video I'm going to show you how to make any effect react to audio automatically in Adobe After Effects so if you're enjoying these videos make sure you leave a like below and don't forget to subscribe if you're new so you don't miss any of my new videos also you guys can follow me on instagram at justin OD show you want to reach out to me i'm real active on there so to begin with let's recreate this scene that we saw in the beginning example and there's many ways to create new compositions you can create them by new composition and make them whatever duration and length you like but if you just drag something like a song onto the timeline then the composition will last exactly as long as that song was so I have a couple things in the project media bin I've got a song and then I've got a video clip just for some nice background imagery and then let's create a text layer so I'll go to layer new text and you can type out whatever you want in this case I'm going to type out react the font that I'm using it's called great shadow and if you go to the align menu I can Center it both horizontally and vertically so now let's get the information from our song so if we right-click on the mp3 file and go to keyframe assistant we can automatically have After Effects convert the audio to keyframes and what they'll do is make a new audio amplitude layer and what this has in it is keyframes based on how loud the audio is so if you hit the drop down arrow on the effects section you'll see there's a left-right and both channels so if for any reason you know how some songs have certain things playing in the left ear and not in the right ear and you wanted to separate those you could in this example I'm just going to use both channels so you can either mute these or even just outright delete them if they're distracting and if I drop this down one more time you can see there's literally a keyframe for every single second of the beat so if we want to see that in graph position you can select the slider to highlight everything and then press this graph editor here and this presents the song it starts off slow and then the drop is right here you can also see it's measured in units from about zero to 50 so the quiet stuff it's around 8 to 10 units and then the loud hits of the beat or drum or more around 40 and 50 units and we can use that information to help us later so how do we use all of this information that we just generated from the song to control our effects it's pretty simple really and you can use it on literally any effect so the possibilities are endless let's drop down our react layer for example and pretty much every layer comes with some transform options like scale position opacity so let's say we wanted to make the text bounce to the beat by increasing the scale all you have to do is hold alt or option and press on the scale keyframe and what that will do is enable expression keyframes you see all these options came in here for us to type an expression but what we can also do is use this little pick whip expression which is the swirl and click and drag that line onto the slider so now when I play that back you'll see that the scale is reacting directly to the music but it's reacting in a 0 to 100 type of way and it's not exactly how we want that to happen so what we can do is go back to that expression and just add a little addition onto the end of it to adjust it to our needs so right now it's saying temp temp is the value and that's going to change based on the value of the audio so as you saw in the graph it might go from 0 to 50 but what we can do is add a plus and add a hundred to the X and y that means the text will stay the original hundred-percent size that we started it as on top of some additional bumps from the music so now you can see it's much more normal how we want it additionally you might find that your keyframes are a bit jumpy depending on audio it's reacting in ways that you don't want maybe you only want to react to the loud kicks and what we can do in this case is smooth things out a bit on the slider using an expression as well so if we hold alt and press on the keyframe for this as well we'll open up the expression and we can use a simple expression to ease the keyframes something like ease and then add a parenthesis value comma and then I'm going to input 0 0 0 0 and explain to you what these four values are and we can adjust them so let's start with the first two zeros this is basically what range are we looking at within the audio expression so when you open this graph we can tell it to only consider things from a certain value to a certain value so if I start only considering things above 20 you'll see that the audio won't cause an effect until the beat drops so let's say I could do 20 to 50 so I'll turn off the graph editor and go back to edit that expression and let's do 20 to 50 that's the ranges that we're going to consider and now the second half is what do you want those ranges that you're considering to be so consider 20 to 50 to add a zero to 100 effect so now we've set a new limit that 20 is going to be considered zero and anything below it and 50 and anything above it is going to be considered 100 now when I play that back you'll see that the audio doesn't really react in the beginning because it doesn't reach that threshold that we set only when the beat drops over here do you see it start to react and it's a lot more stiff with it it doesn't react to every little change in the music so you can play around with these values and try to fine tune them and another last thing you can do is use the smoother panel so let's say you can highlight your keyframes and try to smooth them with let's say a tolerance of 10 and press apply and what that will do is it'll look at your keyframes and it'll just blend them together a bit so you can see the whole first half kind of blends together and it spaces the keyframes out a little bit so if you're looking for some type of smoother motion you can play around as these smoothing but often I found that it kind of makes things go off beat unless you really play around with and get the perfect tolerance but it's there if you want to use it and the really cool part about this is you can literally use these audio amplitude keyframes for everything let's say you were to apply any of the effects in the effects panel onto your clip like brightness and contrast you can literally make anything with a stopwatch keyframe react to the slider that you created earlier so I'll hold alt I'll click on the brightness and I'll say make the brightness controlled by the audio as well so now you'll see as the music flashes you'll also get a brightness and contrast flash and you can see the the red value here go up right now it's at 5 but at the certain hits of the beat it gets much higher like 30 50 whatever the specific combo I used in the beginning example was brightness contrast and a bit of a channel blur so this gives you that 3d blurring lens effect that channel separation so I could add some red blurriness make it only horizontal and then alt click it grab the pick whip and make that controlled by the slider and now the blurriness will also only be present at loud or large hits or base moments of the beat so that's how you can control any effect with automatic audio keyframes and Adobe After Effects if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you leave a like below let me know just all in the comments and subscribe to my channel if you're not yet - stay tuned for all of my new videos go follow me on Instagram if you want to reach out to me I'm real active all in there and once again thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Justin Odisho

Views: 1,342,374

Keywords: After effects 2017, tutorial after effects, adobe after effects, adobe, after effect, tutorial, after effects audio react, after effects audio reaction, how to make audio react in after effects, after effects audio react tutorial, after effects audio visualizer, after effects audio spectrum, after effects pulse to music, after effects make anything react to audio, after effects audio keyframes, after effects tutorial, after effects flash effect, after effects shake effect, cc

Id: ZmmTA9N5ySw

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Q-ArtsMedia]

Use addition or multiplication at the end of the expression to increase the value.

The other way is to use a if/else expressions or a linear expression tied to the slider or use a plugin such as Sound Keys.

Adobe help or the expression menu can show you the expressions you need to use.