Creating a Visualizer Effect in After Effects

As we begin our journey in creating a visualizer effect in After Effects, let's start at 12,000 and work our way down. We're aiming to create a party atmosphere with lots of lines going on, so it's essential to crank up the frequency bands to get more people to the party. We can make these effects a little thinner by adjusting the frequency bands, which will allow us to increase the overall effect.

Once we've got our party atmosphere established, let's talk about color. After Effects offers a wide range of colors and gradients that we can use to create a unique visualizer effect. For this demonstration, I recommend creating a soft gradient with a blue tone on the inside and a darker, more vibrant blue on the outside. By adjusting the Hue interpolation, we can mix different colors together to create a smooth transition between hues.

One of the key settings in After Effects is the start frequency, which is measured in hertz. The lower the number of hertz, the deeper the tone, so if we set it low, we'll get more of the low frequencies like at 1 HZ. However, by increasing the frequency, we can limit the overall effect and achieve a smoother, more mid-range sound. A good starting point for this is 20 Hz, which provides a nice balance between depth and smoothness.

Now that we've created our visualizer effect, let's talk about rendering it. To do this, we need to export the file and add it to the render queue. I typically use lossless settings, which provide the highest quality possible but also result in larger file sizes. By using these settings, we can achieve the best possible results from our After Effects effects.

For this demonstration, I've added a background image to our visualizer effect, which will be used as a transparent layer when exported. To do this, I dragged the background image into the timeline beneath the effect layer, ensuring that it's layered on top of everything else. This will give us a nice, clean look for our final output.

To add an extra touch to our visualizer effect, let's talk about color correction and enhancement. We can use the effects panel to adjust the color of our background image, making it match the tone of our visualizer effect. By applying a cool tone with blue undertones, we can create a unique and captivating look that complements our party atmosphere.

Now that we've completed our visualizer effect, let's take a step back and admire our handiwork. We've created a stunning effect that showcases the capabilities of After Effects. Whether you're looking to add some flair to your videos or simply experiment with new effects, this tutorial has provided a comprehensive guide on how to create a visually striking visualizer effect.

Tips and Tricks:

* Experiment with different frequency bands to achieve unique soundscapes.

* Use color interpolation to mix hues together and create smooth transitions.

* Adjust the start frequency to control the tone of your audio.

* Use lossless settings for the highest quality possible, but be prepared for larger file sizes.

* Add background images or other visual elements to enhance your effect.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello this is Ken from the computer Clan here today with an Adobe After Effects tutorial today I'm going to be showing you how to make music visualizers sometimes when you watch videos on YouTube from like a musician or something you typically get the song in the video but videos are more than just music sometimes you need something to go with it sometimes you see those music visualizers that are animated to the sound of the music just to give it more of a better feeling so you have something to watch while you listen to the music we have a blank project open here there is nothing in here so before we work with music and pictures or whatever we need to import our assets so file import file command I on OS 10 control I on Windows press that and choose your music that you want to make the animation to I'm going to be using a piece from our computer Showdown OST so I selected it hit open it's now on the side panel here now when you make visualizers you can make them against what's called an alpha Channel an alpha Channel represents transparency so when you render out the animation it can be layered on top of other videos and pictures inside of other programs but for this demonstration I'm just going to show it being used with a background so if I'm going to use a background I'm going to have to import that too so once again file import file and I'm going to choose the album artwork as the background so I'll select that press open again and we're good to go we have our assets now let's go to the composition menu and press composition command n on OS 10 control n on Windows and set your settings this demonstration is for a 720p highdefinition video so I'm going to use these settings 1280 x 720 and I'm going to name it visualize okay whenever your settings are good just hit okay and now your timeline shows up so now select the music file from the side panel here in the browser and drag it down to the timeline and you can reposition it at the beginning here so it lines up with the playhead at the 0 second Mark and as you can see over here we have some dead space that's just because my project settings were set a little bit longer yours may not be that long so if you need to change your time maybe make it longer or shorter you can go to the composition menu and hit composition settings here under duration you can change how long you want your project to be the song I have over here says it's 3 minutes and 54 seconds so I can change the duration to 3 minutes and we'll say 55 seconds now we have less dead space and you can also drag this work area end box to adjust the timeline length now let's do the the visualizer go back to the beginning by dragging your playhead to the 0c mark go to layer new solid command y on OS 10 control y on Windows we're making a solid to basically be like a workspace for the effect so it has somewhere to go uh the color doesn't matter because this is going to be replaced uh I'll just do white or like a gray just so you can see it better and the resolution should match the workspace so earlier we set 720p so 1280 x 720 here works fine if you're not sure of what resolution you need let's say this is way out of whack just say make comp size when you do that it will fix it for you so I'm going to call this layer effect I'm just going to capitalize it so you don't miss that right so effect boom right there in the timeline good to go now we need to do something with this solid right now it's pretty boring right so make sure the solid l is selected that's our effect layer go to the effect menu go to generate and audio Spectrum audio waveform is a little different we want Spectrum for the kind of visualizer effect that we're going for so choose that and now as you can see the solid was already replaced with an alpha Channel and the effect and as of right now it doesn't really look like much does it after effects needs to know what music the effect is working with so over here we used to have this project panel open right you remember this this is where our files were but now we have this effects tab which gives us all of the settings for the visualizer it's pretty cool so we'll go to the audio layer option and we're going to tell it what song to use once you do that after effects will know what music to animate to as you scrub the playhead you may already notice a little bit of Animation taking place here right now not much is going on because we didn't change many settings but this is starting to look a bit familiar right so just to give you a quick overview of how this works the taller the line is the louder the amplitude is at a certain frequency typically in a visualizer kind of effect like this the low frequencies like the Basse are way down here then you have the midrange in the middle and then you have the treble way up here so that's kind of how that goes and that's what this is here so we can change all these effects here colors let's change some colors maybe but first let's maybe make them thicker so dragging up the thickness makes the lines wider it's kind of like making text bold that's the thickness there so now they're a bit easier to see softness is this kind of blur effect you see how that's a little blurry right there if we drag this down it gets the solid look it's very hard on the edge if we go up it's really blurry so maybe we'll find a happy medium like 17 19 whatever looks pretty good there and another good thing I like to change is the maximum height so that's how tall the lines and the effect can get we can really Crank that up we can let them go up to gez however high they want let's go let's just keep going we're at like 12,000 right now let's keep cranking that that looks good so now we're yeah see now it's a party see stuff's going down now so okay now we're getting somewhere maybe we can U make these a little bit thinner and under frequency bands we can actually increase this so you get a lot more people to the party you know so we got a lot more lines going on that looks pretty cool maybe we'll turn up the softness a bit just play with the settings you know there's a whole bunch of things you can do and color now this is pretty self-explanatory pink pink right now it's pink so let's change it a bit my recommendation is do a very soft gradient that's just what I like to do so I'm going to do like a blue on the inside like a light blue so we'll do c like this light blue color here then we'll do that for the outside but we'll make it a bit darker or maybe make it more blue in the Hue so we can do kind of like that and now it looks pretty you got a little gradient between these two colors here also if you want the Hue interpolation you can actually mix different colors together by dragging this dial here and then you can kind of get some purple in the middle and some blues and gradients and stuff going on we can just crank that a bit so now we got a lot of colors going on here I'm just showing you some bonus things you can really do whatever you want but another thing to know is the start frequency this from what I've interpreted is in hertz so the lower the number of Hertz the deeper the tone so if you have it really low here the really low frequencies like at 1 htz those are going to show up in the effect but if you crank it up as you can see it starts to kind of be a little more limited so the default is 20 if you want more of like a smooth effect you can go up to the more of the mid-range and get something kind of like that but if you want more of a broad range of frequencies 20 is a good starting point 20 HZ is much lower okay so now if we rendered this out this would be an alpha Channel it wouldn't be black you would have this as an transparent background and you can overlay it on other videos or whatever you want inside of your nonlinear editing software like Final Cup Pro Sony vegus Adobe Premiere whatever but for this demonstration I'm going to throw a background in here so I'm going to take my computer Showdown image and I'm going to put the background in the timeline beneath the effect layer since it's the background it needs to be further behind so the layer on top is literally the layer on top like stacking paper so we want the background down here and I'll just drag it around a bit like right about there okay that looks good so now I got that background going on there just for this demonstration and maybe I'll do a hue change to the background here so I'm just going to go to my effects panel type in Hue and drag that on and change the color a bit let's say maybe we can make it match the visualizer make it get give it like a cool effect cool colors cool tones blue right there you know something kind of like that whatever you want to do that's where the creative part kicks in now that you know some of the basics that's where you let your imagination go and just have fun with all of the things you can do in After Effects cuz really it's pretty unlimited so now it looks like we're good to go if you want and you're done you can now export this file export add to render que so now it's down here in the queue I typically like to use lossless which basically just means the highest quality possible typically a larger file size but highest quality so I use that when using effects from After Effects and other programs once all the settings look good click render and it's now going to go through and process each frame of animation and make a movie for you in this particular case I have it set to make a QuickTime movie the audio will be in there as well you can also add in the audio later in post production if you'd like so I hope you learned something if you have any questions or suggestions whatever you'd like let us know in the comments below I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the next video don't forget to subscribe to stay in touch with more real deal videos and click that like button if you like the video also check out our 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