Audio Spectrum Visualizer in After Effects

1. Introduction to the course: Hi, I'm neatest. I'm mostly working with musicians and I'm creating videos, popular music. In this course, I will teach you how to make an audio reactor in After Effects. In the beginning, we will go through the essential parameters of audio spectral method. Then we will create an actual audio reactor. We will use two different techniques in this project. At first, we will create multiple audio spectrum. We will stack them one on the other end. This technique will let us build a beautiful and complex looking audio reactor. Then we will use a different method. We will create a bunch of particles and we will force them to move based on music. Or if you use After Effects for the first time, I will show you how to make everything step by step. At the end of this course, you will chatter good knowledge on how to create an audio reactor, follow my instructions and create one virtue like now you need to find the song that you like and join me in the next class. 2. Basic settings of Audio spectrum Effect: So let's start by opening after effects. If you would like to have the same view as I do, you can go to Window Workspace and choose the workspace to default. In that case, we will have the same view and it would be easier to navigate what I am doing. So to start, we need to create a new composition. Let's create at ten ADB composition, you can choose the presets. Usually, I choose this HDTV, B25 Bray frames per second, or four gauge, 25 frames per second. So it's up to you. You can choose whatever you want. I will use this data need to be. In this demonstration. Let's change the duration to maybe three minutes. I'm not really sure yet how long is my song and press OK. So let's import the song for our audio reactor. Just double-click on the project and import the song from your computer. I license for song and I will use it in this project. Let's create a background for our composition. Just press rights. Mao's button, click new and solid, and change when name or the solid to the background region. You can choose any color you want. I will choose black barbers and press OK. So we have a black background. There is an alternative way to do this. You can just go to layer new and solid. It will give you the same result as right-clicking here. But it's just easy for me. It's faster I think. Okay, let's create another solid. I will do this in other way. Layer, New and solid. I will make this one. I don't know in different color. We want superscalar so you can choose any color you want. I will choose the red because you just see the different color here. So red solid. Let's name it. Audio, reactor, or maybe spectrum. Okay? And let's search for the effects that we need to create an audio spectrum. You can go here at defects and presets and search for spectrum. Something like James Bond movie. Generate audio spectrum, drag-and-drop on our audio spectrum layer. And as I said, it will be invisible, so, so we have it. The first thing that we need to do is just to setup our audio. Because as you can see. Well, spectrum is not reacting at all. So drag your song to the composition. Still, you see it doesn't react. So let's go to audio spectrum. And in audio layer, you can choose your audio file. Now you see that we have some, some action. Our audio spectrum is reacting. Maybe let's change the colors at first because this, let's make it full quality. This purple color is not very visible in the black background. So let's change it. Here you can see two settings of the colors with first one will change with insight color or the audio reactor. I will change it to the wyatt because it will be very contrasted to a black. And as you can see, our insight color is white. We can choose our color. I prefer missing. And we will have our audio reactor all white. Okay, other settings is start point and endpoint. Actually you can see those start points and n points in our composition. You can just take it and drag it whatever you, whichever way you want. And create this. And create a style where veggie one, you can do it vertical. You can do it whatever you want. So I'll just bad by, by pressing control z. And with this sitting, you can regulate the start and end points of the audio reactor. And MS setting is Beth, as you can see, it's empty. But we can create a bath and adjust our audio spectrum based on our path. What does it mean? Let's create one. Now. Let's use this rectangular tool. If you press and hold, you can see that we have more tools. Let's choose the rectangular. For now. Select the audio spectrum layer and draw a rectangular just simply in the way that you want. It doesn't matter how it will. We created a mask, and now we can see only things bad. Inside of this mask. We can change the settings and change it to none. In that case, our mask didn't have any impact on our view. But it's created a path. As you can see, we have mask one. So if we get back to our audio spectrum and choose this path, our audio reactor is now in the same form as our path. As you can see, if we will press this button, we will disable the visibility of the mask. And now we will see it clear. So we can draw an audio rapture in any form that we want. Let's create one more form. Let's create another mask. But this time let's use a gentle eye will enable this mask shape is ability again. And I will create some kind of crazy grazie form. And let's choose the path to this second mask that we just created. And as you can see, we just created audio reactor for the new bath. So it's simple as it is. I will choose none for wisdom and traded demonstration purposes. Ok, now we add frequencies. The default frequencies on after ethics from, is from 20 to 20 thousand. But usually we don't see very, very low spectrum. What's below 20 and what is above usually 2 thousand, it's not very visible. That's why it's practical to have this second number, end of frequency lower. So let's change it to 2 thousand at the moment. It really depends on the song. Sometimes something like 800 looks the best. Sometimes around 1000 or 1500 looks best. So it depends on your song and it depends on what frequencies you would like to show on your audio spectrum. So met, let's decrease it even more and make it 100. Now will have more reaction in the wall or your reactor. The second Settings is frequency bands. You can choose how many frequency bands you would like to see in your audio reactor. As you can see, if I will choose 256, we have a lot of frequency bands and it's just scab this own unique look. If we will increase even more, we can type any number. I believe a maximum is, the maximum is 4,096. So it's basically a smooth line. I will get back to something like 54 now. So if you see I can have a higher or lower waves. It depends also on my on what I would like to achieve. This 90 millisecond audio iteration works most of the time for my projects. If you will increase, you will have this slow type auditory reaction. You can see it's very slow. If you will decrease to something like ten, it will be very, very quick and not very pleasant to the eye. So, but if you keep it at 90, it will have a default luck. But you can play with it and see what works best for you. Audio offset is not very often used setting in effect. If you would like to have some offset in your audio reaction, I don't know the purpose. Maybe you'd like to create a waves vet react to to your audio. And you would like to create a multiple audio reactors. And every other way we have some kind of an offset that might be useful, but I can figure out other cases where we could use it at the moment. Usually it's set on 0. Thickness thickness is another very useful setting. It will set with thickness for the waves. The bigger the number the thicker waves are. Henri softness usually we use 0%. It will set the blurriness of the audio reactor. As you can see on 0, it's very sharp and crispy. And on a 100 it's very blurry. On the default, it's on 50, but my default to 0. We already talked about the colors. And another thing that I would like to talk is both the display options. By default we have digital, so both digital lines. We can also choose an analog lines. So we have an analog line which reacting to the music, which is really cool-looking line. Or we have an analog dots. In this way, we have a dots which reacting to the music and it looks really cool. Another option that I would like to talk is this site a and B option. If we have side a and B, we have reaction in the both sides in to a, nb, if we will choose a, it will react only on one side. If we choose B, it will react on the other side. So for example, let's choose the a and we have a reactant dots that looks really cool. So that's the basic settings that you need to know when you're creating an audio spectrum. In the next lesson, we will create a more useful and complex audio reactor. 3. 1st layer of Audio Spectrum: The last lesson we ended here. Let's continue from me. Here. Let's delete all our audio spectrum layer and create a new one, new solid. And I will change the name of the solid two spectrum. One, let's add a audio spectrum to our layer, and let's draw a mask. Okay, let's start drawing from the center. Press control on BC or Command on the Mac. And you will be drawing right into the center of the of the our composition while holding control, press Shift N, you will draw a perfect circle. Let's make it not too big or something like that. We don't want it to impact our composition. And let's choose with bath to this mask. Also. Lets choose the audio layer to our song. So we will see an audio reactor. We can change the colors here, or we can just use bit fill effect, which we'll change the colors of everything. Way more easier when you can just drag and drop it on our layer or into effect controls. Let's change the color to white. And as you can see, even our rectal reactor color is purple. Our fill color change this to be color of edge. We want. In this case, I would like to create Audi reactor black and to have the background why it's so I will drag fill efforts to the background. I will change it to white. Because we have a white background. We can see our weight audio spectrum. That's why I will choose the different color. I will choose a dark grey color, not pure white. I think it looks better that way. And now we have our audio spectrum which reacts to our song. Now let's work a little bit on vis settings. I would like to decrease my infrequency to 1100. In that way, I will have a better reaction to the song. Let's increase the frequency bands term, something like 200. Maybe a little bit less. Let's make it 150. Okay, 1.5.2. Looks good. Maximum high. Let's experiment with this a little bit. Something around here, maybe a little bit less. Maybe 500s. Let's keep it at 500. Audio Duration. We leave it as it is. Thickness. Maybe. Let's reduce the softness now. We will see it better. Thickness. We can make it thicker. I think that's good. We will be able to change those settings later in the editing process bets, but it's not a big problem. And that's it for this written spectrum. 4. 2nd layer of Audio Spectrum: The next thing that I would like to do is just to draw a line around this spectrum. So let's duplicate with spectrum by pressing control and D or Command D. If you want to rename your layer, you can just press enter on it and you can change the name spectrum tube. It's a good habit to save your working files once in a while because after affects its quite a stable program, but it crashes sometimes, especially when you work on the big projects. To save us project just breast file and save. Because I already saved this file, I will choose save as just type filename. For example, audio spectrum and oppressive aftermath. You will be able to save your project very easily just by pressing control and S, and I would recommend you to do that every time you do something significant. So let's work on our second spectrum. I will change a display options from digital to analog lines. And now I have line exactly the same as our first reactor. I will choose below at a part of this song. I can easily find it by pressing on our audio layer and double-clicking L, L, L. And we have our audio form. And you can see in the waveform where we have more reaction. For example, here, I will get back to my spectrum tomb. And I will change besides, because I want this line only on outside of my spectrum. I will need only beside a. Oh sorry, side B. Side b is o sine. And that looks quite good. Maybe the thing that I would like to change is to increase the thickness. I would like to make this line a little bit figure something like 4.5 for a six. So that's fine. Maybe it could increase the three, the height of the bends a little bit. But I want those to be connected. So that's our second spectrum. 5. 3rd layer of Audio Spectrum: The next thing that I would like to add is the dots that would react into inside of this spectrum. So I will create another spectrum by pressing control D on a spectrum, two will change analog lands to analog dots. And as you can see, I can see this reactor yet because it's the same height as our lines. So I will increase the maximum height and it is on outside of our reactor. I would like to have it inside. I will change it to side B. And now it is inside of it here we can change or do you duration a little bit? We can decrease it a little bit. In that case, we will have a little bit different reaction. And that looks really good. 6. 4th layer of Audio Spectrum: Let's create another spectrum. I would like to have. And I have a line of dots which will be a little bit thinner. And they would outline a little bit differently on the audio spectrum, on a little bit different positions, how it's achieved at. Let's duplicate our audio spectrum. Number three. Now we have number four. Let's decrease the start frequency to warn. Let decrease band frequency by something like a half to 600 words, 500. We can do by 50, exactly half. And now we have another line of dots, which looks a little bit different, but it's still reacts to our song. Another thing that I would like to do is just make them a little bit different by decreasing the thickness of it. As you can see, we have thinner. We have finner dots. And that looks really good. 7. 5th layer of Audio Spectrum: Let's continue by creating a novice spectrum by pressing control D on our spectrum form. Now we have spectrum five. With this spectrum, I would like to have an outside line of dots which will react to the song. First thing we need to change is beside, let's change it to the side B. And now we have an outside dots. I don't want them to be symmetrical to the spectrum for because as you can see, it reacts with same just in the other side. So let's change infrequency a little bit to something like 800. We don't need that much change. Let's change to 800. And you already see the separation. Maybe let decrease with maximum height a little bit. Something like 400. And in Greece with thickness a little bit, something like free. And I think that looks wide good for now. 8. 6th layer of Audio Spectrum: We will create another spectrum, the last one. Number six. My pressing Control D on spectrum fire. In this spectrum, I would like to make it slightly different and a little bit thicker also on the outside of office spectrum. Let's change the start frequency. Let's get back to 20. Let's change the end frequency, or maybe cubits. At 800. We already changed it a little bit. Let's increase with thickness a little bit. So we would have a different thickness of both reactors. I'm searching for the barge wet reacts. I think that looks quite good. 9. Final adjustments for all the spectrum layers: We will create another spectrum, the last one. Number six. My pressing Control D on spectrum fire. In this spectrum, I would like to make it slightly different. And a little bit figure also on the outside of office spectrum. Let's change with that frequency. Let's get back to 20. Let's change bit end frequency, or maybe cubits. At 800. We already changed it a little bit. Let's increase the thickness a little bit. So we would have different thickness of walls reactors. I'm searching for a byte wet reacts. I think that looks quite good. Before moving on, I would like to change some settings. Now when we see a full image of the audio reactor, we can change the settings according to our needs. For example, I would like to freeze the thickness of this line. So I believe that was our second spectrum. So let's try to increase with thickness a little bit. Yeah, that's that's that's what I need. Now those dots on the outside look a little bit better. Be look a little bit smaller, but I would like to decrease the thickness of those a little bit. Do something like that. I believe I would like to decrease with the thickness of the spectrum number six, n Maybe let's play a little bit with the frequencies. I would like to move those a little bit further from this spectrum five. So let's see what we like. Maybe some where here. Let's try to increase the height of it a little bit. Maximum height may will be further way from from an actual spectrum. Maybe that will. Yeah, I like both particles jumping. Maybe increase the height a little bit on bys 12. Yeah, I like woes, Maslow's particles. I think that's the view that I wanted to achieve. And now I'm thinking maybe we could change the height a little bit on those other inside particles. Also. Spectrum 45 have the same height? Spectrum for I believe is a thinner one. Yeah. So I would like it to go a little bit deeper into recenter, so I only increase the height of it. And I will decrease the height a little bit on the spectrum free. And i will change the frequency a little bit compared to spectrum one because it has the same frequency started and N. So I will decrease by one and N frequency will change. 700. Maybe. It's a little bit chaos out there. Let's increase with height. May be too high. Now, I think I achieved a look that I would like to see. Yeah, I like the scales of dots jumping around. So I like it. I will stick with vis look. And we will continue to create the particles which will be going out of this spectrum. 10. Create the particle world: So in this lesson, we will continue to work on our audio spectrum. We will create an, a particles which will be just basically exploding from our audio spectrum. So to do that, we will create a new solid. We will change the color to maybe blue. It doesn't really matter. We want CVA, scholar and way and name its particles. Okay, whichever particles. And let's search for an effect. Cc particle world. If you start searching for a particle, you'll find it. And we have the particles shooting out of our spectrum. Of course, we don't want to see bad kinds of particles. So we need to change the particle texture. To do that, we need to change the particle type from line two, texture disk. And now we can't see anything. If we want to see something, We need the texture. 11. Create a snowflake: In this lesson, we will, we will create a simple snowflake and that will be our particle, which will be shorted out of our spectrum. To do that, let's create a new composition. Just click right mouse button, new composition or composition, new composition. It appears on the next screen for me. Let's name it, snowflake and press OK. So here we have our new composition, lead start drawing. Before that, I would like to join on the tidal action. Now we will see vCenter better and that will be easier to draw. Let's grab a pen tool by clicking this or just pressing G on the, on the keyboard. And let's start drawing as trade lion. I want to be sure that you have fill, tuned off and stroked on, on stroke and be in their various size. We will change that later if we will need vast. But let's keep it that way for now. To continue a draw this snowflake shape. Let's draw something like that. Maybe let's move it a little bit lower because if we will increase the stroke at one, be very visible. If I will start draw another one, you can see what happens. It continued to draw this snowflakes. So just press Control Z to get back and the breast v to enable Selection Tool press anywhere. And that will fix bad shape. So to draw another one and just bread g to enable pencil and start drawing another shape. Let's adjust this one also a little bit. Some middle egg. Whoops. You can just go to v And now edit posts points. I think that looks good. Our snowflake shouldn't be perfect. That should work perfectly for us to continue to draw snowflake. Just duplicate our ship layer by a person Control D. Breasts are for rotation and rotated by 60 degrees. To continue, we need to make another duplicate. Let's duplicate this layer, breast r again and rotated by 60 degrees more. So in total, a 120 degrees or in case you would have a complex mental math on, on some function, it's useful to know that you can do the maths straight into his window, 60 plus 60 equals 120. And we have a snowflake. It's not perfect. We can adjust it a little bit, but it doesn't really matter too much. Most snowflakes will be very small and we don't see all imperfections. 12. Make snowflake as a particle: Now when we have our snowflake created Weekend can batch our composition, main composition, go to particles and the select our texture. Of course it's not an hour timeline yet, so let's drag it. Java timeline. I will keep it at the top so it will be easier to find it. Let's select our snowflake and our particles become snowflakes. We can disable widths that. We don't want to see this big snowflake. And we see our snowflakes. The first thing that I would like to change in the particles. I would like to change with physics. 13. Particle world settings: To be exact, I would like to change the gravity because now snowflakes falling down, I would like them to shoot outside of this audio reactor and just melted in air, basically turn off gravity by adjusting it to 0. Now you see snowflakes are just floating in the air. We can increase the resistance a little bits so we have a better shooting effect. I don't know how much I should increase it, but let's keep it at free for now. And we will see in the future how much we will need more. Another thing that I would like to change, I would like to increase the thickness of this no clicks if you like them as we are now, you can leave it, but I would like to see a thicker snowflakes. So let's get back to our snowflake composition and select all the layers and just increase with stroke. Easy as that. And our lives will be thicker, more visible. Okay, let's get back to particles, layer a. Let's change some settings. I'll change maxim opacity to 100. In that way we will have very bright snowflakes. Says variation. I'm not really sure where I would like to go. If I will set this to 0, I will have is snow placed in the same size. The more I increase this number, the more variety of snowflake size I will have. So maybe let's keep it at 54 now, maybe 30. Let's try for a default for now. Other settings, the most important settings, probably the birth rate and longevity. You can see we can adjust those settings and the longer longevity, we have a more snowflakes we will have, for example, if we keep snowflakes alive for four seconds, we will have a lot and a lot of those. That's why I will decrease it to something like two maybe. Of course, birth rates will have the same effect. And the most of snowflakes we will produce, the more we will have. So both Settings works really together. I would like to make both snowflakes shoot a little bit wider. I'd like to hide all fit, but I would like them to shoot a little bit wider, maybe till here we can go to producer, play a little bit with radius. For example, if we will increase the x radius, we will have more snowflakes in on the x-axis. Here we can regulate with y-axis Central. I really liked how it was before. And here we can regulate with z axis the death of his novel X. I will keep it as it was. I just wanted to fill this green a little bit better on, on Besides, I think that the top and the bottom of the screen looks good. Maybe I will decrease it a little bit. Maybe it's a little bit too wide, but now that should be perfect. 14. Hide the particles in the center: Another thing I don't really like how both snowflakes appears on on the basically on the middle of the reactor. I would like it to be empty. So to do that, we can duplicate any spectrum layer. Just by pressing D. We can remove audio spectrum drum, FX. And we have basically a dark grey solids. If you remember at the beginning we created to mask and we disable it. Now we can enable it again by choosing ad on the settings. And we have this dark gray circle, which is the same size as our spectrum. We can rename it to mask and place it above a particles. Now on the particles track Matt settings. If you don't see bow stroke, drag mass settings press F4 can enable and disable those. With F four. Choose Alpha matter mask, no, alpha inverted Madame ask this mask, masked all the center of our circle. Basically. We have really rough guts, but I don't know, maybe it will be fine. Or weekend in Greece. The fever a little bit. In that case at one view that our transition also we, if we do that, we will need to increase the diameter of the circle. So we can do is by scaling it just breast S and increase the scale a little bits. That will be enough. And that it looks really good. 15. Force particles to react to the music: Ok, next thing I would like to make voce snowflakes react to the music. To do that, I need to create a keyframes from our music. It's really easy, just Braess right mouse button and go to keyframe assistant and can convert audio to keyframes, breastfed. And we have a new layer which called audio amplitude. It has been keyframes of our audio. If we go here we have left channel, right channel, and both channels we don't need right and left channels. So we can leave them on weekend, just delete them. And we have a keyframes for both channels. As you can see with stronger music, It is the bigger number we have. We can use bed in our particles. We can expand our earth effects, adjust the birth rate based on our keyframes that we have to do that we need to press out and select this clock. It will enable us to write expressions, but don't be scared. We don't need to write anything. We have this big WIP which we can drag and drop on our keyframes vet, we created drag and drop. And as you can see, we have the same number here as our generated keyframe is. For example, 28 is a huge number and we will keep this number. We will canvas durable view with a lot of snowflakes. To decrease that, we can just divide this number, divide by something 15-20, I'll make it some maybe 18. And we have way way where less snowflakes to adjust, but we can easily adjust fed by changing this number. If we will make this number lower, we will have more snowflake soup. We will make this number higher. We will have less snowflakes. So as you can see in the first couple of seconds, our reactor do not react and it doesn't produce any snowflakes at all. That's exactly what we need. And we can hide VO settings for now and see how our reactor looks like. By looking at it, I think we can increase the thickness once again a little bit. So let's go back to the snowflake composition and increase the thickness. I like this, look way better. And as you can see an on some parts we have quite a lot of snowflakes. And so far out, I think it looks quite good. We don't need to make any changes. We can play with resistance a little bit, but that's not very needed. I think free was a good number. And I think our reactor looks good. We can produce a little bit more snowflakes by increasing longevity. There's an easy fix we need that. Having that works very well. 16. Add the text: The next thing that I would like to do, I would like to write an artist's name and with some name in the middle of audio reactor. To do that, I will just click right mouse button new and create new techs. I'll make it on top. I will double-click and I will type the artist named. And on the next line, unless I think possible, font is a perfect font. For this, I would like to decrease the artist name a little bit and I would like it to make something like a half compared to the so name. We can align it to the center. And I think that looks good. And the only thing that I would like to change, I would like to make the text color to this same two reactor GL. So we can just copy reveal effect to our text. And it will have a same with same color. 17. Rendering: Now we can render our audio reactor. I will press double l on the music to see where it starts and where it ends. Basically, we can select with those where we will start rendering and where we will end. So of course we need to set it to start off the music and the end of a music, maybe you would like, choose different. So for the obvious sequence that's up to you, maybe you would like to render a music for Instagram or something like that. That's fine. So don't forget to save your file. Just pressing Control S. Go to File, Export to Media Encoder. Here you can see some older files of mine. I will delete bows. And here we can change where we'll, we'll extract this. This is the second version of audio reactor Vet I'm creating. Then we can adjust more settings by clicking on here. I will draw command to use h, h2 64 that's recorded for MP4 files. You will care really good quality and relatively small file sizes. That's the most used. And I would really recommend this setting. Here. It can change the outputs the same that we does before. I'll press whose maximum render quality and I will increase the bit rate a little bit to 20 or something like mad. Gaza would like to have a better quality of the video. And just click OK. Here you can click start and it will start to render. It will take, I don't know, for me, it's like ten seconds may increase a little bit when the particles will appear. But it depends on your computer how long it will render. 18. Final result: Hey, you made it. Congratulations. Here you can see an audio reactor that I have created. And I hope that you created with audio reactive that you like and the one vet you wanted to create a hope your bet you land something interesting and useful in discourse. If you created an audio reactor by using discourse, Don't forget to post it on with class files so that everyone could see it if you share it on social media, don't forget to tag me as SPL GA so I can see it like and leave a comment. Thank you so much for taking this class and see you in the next one. Okay? Okay. No.