After Effects: Create a Dynamic Audio Visualizer (No Plugins)

1. Introduction & Project Preview: Hi, everyone. I'm Kaz. I'm a Boton graphics designer specializing in cinematic lyric videos and music visuals with years of experience crafting animations that move with music. In this class, I'll teach you how to create a dynamic audio visualizer in Adobe After Effects, using only built in effects, no plug ins required. You'll learn how to link visuals to your track using the audio spectrum effect, customize the style to fit the mood of your music. Add backgrounds and effects to make your visualizer feel cinematic and polished. The end of this class, you'll have a Finnish audio visualizer ready to share and you'll know how to adapt the techniques to any song you choose. For the project, you can use your own track or download a royalty free song like the one I'll be using from Pixi Bay Music. Here's what you'll be creating. Thank you for watching May intro. I can't wait to see what you create. Let's get started. 2. Connecting the Audio Spectrum to Your Track: So in this lesson, we are going to import the audio and attach it to an audio spectrum. So there's a couple of ways you can import an audio file. You can go to File, Import File, or you can double click in the Project panel, or you can go to your folder, and bring in the audio, like so. Now we're going to create a composition. If you're new to after effects, so composition is basically what you'll be working on. It's kind of like a canvas for your work, and it's called a comp for short. And you can create a comp in a couple of different ways as well, go to composition, new composition. Or you can right click in the project panel, go to new composition, or you can click on this little icon here that kind of looks like a video player, and it gets up your composition settings. So we'll start by giving it a name and let's name it audio visualizer. And we'll make it 1920 by 1080, which is standard HD, 30 frames per second, which is a great default and 20 seconds for the duration. And click Okay. Now drag your audiophile to the timeline. Next, we need to have a solid, so you go to layer new solid, and we'll call it visualizer. Make sure it's comp size, and then you can have it any color you want because that's not going to matter. Click Okay. And now, if you go to the effects and presets up here and search for Audiospectrum, here. And with the layer selected, you can either double click on it or drag it onto the layer. It's double click, you can see now the background color is gone, and we've got this line here. And if you scrub through, nothing happens, and that's because we need to link the song. So here you've got the audio layer, and if you just go to this drop down here and go to select your song. And then if we scrub through, you can see that it's reacting to the music. I'll just play it. Looks pretty cool. And you can change all of these settings here. So you've got your end points and start point, which is where these little pointers are, and you can animate you can animate all this to make it different directions diagonally, can make it shorter. You can put it in random places. We'll just put it back to how it was. You've got your start frequency and end frequency. The start frequency controls the low end, so lower values emphasize the deep base. The end frequency controls the high end. So raising it adds more treble and detail to the spectrum's movement. And you've also got frequency bands here which give it more detail. I put it to a more energetic part of the song. That gives it more detail. And then you've got the maximum height, which makes it bounce more, which is pretty cool. Quite energetic. And then you've got your colors here. You can increase the thickness and the softness. And let's change the color of this to a blue for the moment. So if I just take it back to the default settings, so we can set up our visualizer ready for the tunnel that we're going to make. I'm going to change the display options here to analog dots. You can also change it to analog lines if you would like. I'll show you what that does. It kind of makes it look like a heartbeat, like so. But we are going to have it as analog dots, which is just lots of dots in time with the music. Like so. And we're going to increase the thickness a little bit, maybe to, like, six. And for the color, I'm going to have it as Inside color, we will set it as a light orange. And if you would like the exact colors, it's FFD nine AD. Click Okay. And for the outside color, I'm going to have a deeper orange, and the hex code is FF 8600. Like so, click Okay. And I'm going to change the frequency bands to 200 and the maximum height to 700. Like so. So we got this. That looks pretty cool. So in the next lesson, we are going to make our tunnel. Alright, I will see you there. 3. Creating the Tunnel & Adding a Background: Okay, so to start, we are going to make our tunnel. And for this, we need a mask. So take the Ellipse tool up here. And if you press Command Shift and click in the middle, it'll make the mask from the center, make it quite big, but not right to the edges. And in order to make the visualizer attach the mask up here, there's a path option, and we just need to change this to mask one, and you can see that it's now in the mask or on the mask. So we need to next, we need to make this a three D layer for what we're going to do with our tunnel. So whether there's the cube here, just click that to make it a three D layer. And we're also going to add a glow just to brighten it up a bit. So typing glow, fex in presets and where it's stylized glow here, just put that on the layer and keep that keep the settings as they are. You can always change them. So. And now we need 11 versions of this, so ten copies. So you can press Command D or Control D to make a copy. So let's do that. So now we should have 11 copies, and we are going to rename these to be organized. And I'm going to name this Ring one. This one, Ring two. Ring three. Ring four, and so on. Oops. I have accidentally got my caps lock on. Room nine. Ten. But for this last one, just keep it as visualizer for now because we're going to do something slightly different to that. Okay. So it's this active camera here, we want this on top of you to go to top, and you can see that it's now looking down. And as we made these into three D layers, we can move these in three D space, like so. So if we select all from the visualizer down to Ring two, Ring one is going to stay where it is, leave that alone for the minute. And then with these selected, click P, and that'll bring up position. And now we're going to go through, and we're going to change these by 200. On the Z axis, which is the third one here. So if we start with 200, and then the next one's going to be 400. And as you can see, it's going further back right there, 600, 801,000 1,200, 1,400, 1,600, 1,800. And then for this last one, 2000. And then we should have them all layered back within three D space. And now we want to go back to the active camera, and you can see we've got this kind of tunnel going on. That looks pretty cool. But we're going to add a little bit of variety to it. So we're going to rotate every other ring. So select Ring two, and then with command selected, press ring four, ring six, bring eight, and ring ten, and press R to get rotation up. And for Zaxss can see it's turning there, we're going to change this to 180. So it's just flipped around. So we've got some cool So we've got some cool animation going on there. And now we are going to create a background quickly using some fractile noise. So in order to create some fractal noise, we need a solid. So go to layer, new solid, like so, and we'll name this fractal noise, and it can be any color you want. Just make sure it's comp size. Click Okay, and bring this to the bottom. And then in the effects and presets up here, search for fractal noise, double click on it to add it, and then we're going to change the contrast. Let's bring this right up. Pretty high and bring the brightness right down, so you just got, like, a few little clouds there. And you can change this to your liking. And then we're going to add another solid which you can make any color you want. Just make it a tiny bit golden, maybe. Click Okay. Make sure it's comp size, and click there, bring that underneath. And then we just want to change this to overlay so you can see the little clouds are golden. And then we're going to select both of these together, right click on them, and click on pre compose and type in background. And click Okay. We also want this as a three D layer, so click the little cube bike on there as well. And for this one here, so we want to click press to get the mask up, and we just want to delete the mask. For the background, one thing that you should also do because you can see that a lot of the tunnel is covered. So you want the background really far back, like right behind the tunnel, and then you can increase its size just to cover the canvas like that. And for the visualizer, right down here, we want this kind of in the middle. So it's just aligned through the middle. So just reduce the size just so it's fitting nicely. In the tunnel. And then you can see. Okay, cool. So in the next lesson, we're going to add some camera movements and create the finished product. So I will see you there. 4. Animating the Camera & Evolving the Background: Okay. In this lesson, I'm going to add a camera. To do that, you can go to Layer Nu camera, and you can keep the settings as they are and click Okay. So go to the beginning of your timeline and just on the camera, click P and just move it closer to your tunnel. Like, so you can see how that moves. It's pretty cool. Just maybe here, and we might need just to increase the size of the background again. Like so. And then on the position, click the stopwatch. We're going to make the keyframe easy s, and you can do that by pressing F nine. This just makes animations a bit smoother and then go to about probably about, I think, we'll make it 15 seconds. On the third value here, which is the Z axis, move it right through the tunnel like so until you get to the visualizer here and have it stop right there. So let's just play this. Okay, so what I also want to do with the visualizer, this one is I want to change it to digital. So it's a bit different. And there you go. That's looking pretty cool. So another option what you can do just to give it more life is if you go to the background, click on fractal noise and go to the evolution and click the Stopwatch evolution. And if you select your layer and you press U, that gets up your key frames, and then go right to the end of the animation and maybe put it as three rotations just to see how that looks. And you can see it's slightly moving like that, which is pretty pretty cool. And then if you look back through animation. How funky does that look. Alright. Now, the last thing that we need to do is export it. So once you're happy with everything, you can add it to the render Q, or you can add it to Adobe Media Encoder, whichever you wish. So let's add it to the render Q. And then we can change this to H 264, so you can get icemPth out of it, and then make sure it's saved to the desktop. And click render. And it's rendering it. 5. Final Project & Outro: Class project, you have a couple of options. You can upload the visualizer we created together in this class, or you can experiment and make something extra funky. So you can try changing the colors of the rings of the tunnel. So if we do a couple together quickly, maybe change this one to a blue, and this one to a green And you can see that they've changed like so, that'll create something cool as it goes through lots of different colours. Or you can create a new composition and start from scratch and just create something really cool using the masks. So let's go to new composition to try this out, and we'll name this new visualizer. And all the settings look okay. So we will click Okay. And then if we drag our track down to the timeline like so and create a new solid, new solid, and name this visualizer again. Make sure it's comp size. It can be whatever color you want. Okay. No take the pentle up here and just draw like any kind of shape that you want. Just draw a random shape, like so. Don't close it or anything, just make an open cool shape. And then we're going to add the audio spectrum. Just type in audio spectrum, double click on it to add it. And then we want to select our song and then select mask one. And then if I play this, you can see that it's attached to the moss, and then we can change our frequency bands so there's more of them, and then we can change our thickness to make it more prominent. And then, yeah, that looks cool. Maybe change just analog lines. And then, yeah, just create something cool, some cool shapes and everything and experiment with backgrounds. And when you're ready to share, click on the Projects and Resources tab under this video. Hit Submit project and upload your visualizer. Add a title, a cover image, and a short description, then publish it so I can see your amazing work. Thanks so much for joining me. If you enjoyed this class, make sure to follow me here on Skillshare for more motion graphics tutorials.