Audio Bars Screen Transition

Grid

1. Now Shift-click on the dubstep layer and the Audio Spectrum layer.

2. Right-click on either selected layer and go to Create Precomp.

3. Name the Precomo “Audio Bars.”

4. Double-click to go inside the new Precomp.

5. Create a new Solid.

6. Name it “Grid.”

7. Type “Grid” into the Effects and Presets panel.

8. Add the Grid effect to the new Solid layer.

9. In Effect Controls, change the Border to 10.

10. Change the Grid color to black.

11. If the switches are not visible in the layer stack, click on Toggle Switches / Modes.

12. Click the Preserve Transparency switch on the Grid layer.

Glow

1. Head back to the Main Comp by clicking its name on the top of the layer stack or Composition Window.

2. Type “Glow” in the Effects and Presets panel.

3. Add the Glow effect to the Audio Bar Precomp.

4. Set Glow Radius to 15.

5. Change the Glow Intensity to 1.5.

Video Transcript

Hi guys. This is Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop. And in this tutorial I want to show how to make this full audio bar screen transition in Adobe After Effects. We'll be starting off with making an audio spectrum effect, which is what will give our transition that dance and look after dressing those settings, we're going to add a mini max effect to have it animate and cover the screen.

Then the Posterize time effect and a gradient ramp to add some visual flair. Fine, we'll create a grid and have it be a track meant for our audio spectrum layer to make it look like actual audio bars. Oh, and we'll add a glow effect and this to make it look more digital. So you can see this is what the product looks like when it's done.

And so if you don't know screenshots, I'm sorry, screen transitions or wipes in general are really good for making cuts or jumps in your scene. They help direct the viewer's eye toward whatever you want them to see and make seen changes feel smoother. Anything that covers the screen makes pretty good transition effect. In this case, the screen right for making tree has a cool cyber kind of feel to it, which lends itself well to any projects based around technology, audio or anything urban and so in terms of external assets for this project, we're going to be using a particular music track from Ben SOUTHCOM and these A and B screens.

You can see here for our jump cut these are all going to be available for download below in the description. So let's get started. So the first thing we're going to be doing is head up here. We're going to make a new solid. Thank you very much. And let's name this solid audio spectrum. Audio spectrum, you can probably guess what this is going to turn into.

The color doesn't really matter we're going to be heading over to the Effects and Presets panel here and type in audio spectrum. Add it to our new earned and solid over here. I completely forgot the word that I just used. And now we're going to be changing many settings to get it to appear. Certainly so we're going to choose the audio layer, the audio source to this and be three layer that should already be in the layer stack.

And basically, what's this? This is asking like OK, so what music? You know, what music track, what soundtrack am I taking my appearance from? And by linking it to this MP three file right here, it could be like a spoken word, anything, just anything with an audio file in it. It's like, oh, so that's the wave form that I'm going to be reacting to.

We've got that set up and you can mute your audio or whatever audio you're using to set this button over here, the speakerphone looking kind of thing, because I don't want the sound of it. We just want the look of it. Now that's done. We're going to be changing some settings. So start frequency, let's put that at 100 and in frequency at 1100.

These are the frequencies that the graphics will react to. So it'll start moving at 100 and something at 1100 hertz. We're going to set the frequency bands to 50 and we want the maximum height to 1500. We want this thing real tall. It's going to be even taller when we add the mini React Effect later on. Now this part is optional.

It's just a personal preference, but I'm going to set my audio duration to 40 in audio offset to 30. This is how long the visuals will react to each part of the way. Form and offset delays are by some amount of milliseconds finally we're going to set thickness to five. That's pretty self-explanatory and softness. 04 nice crisp look and now we're going to be setting the display options to analog.

That's this what analog lines look like. But we want the dots. Um, yep. Oh, right. And then side eight, so they're only going upwards, you can see. And yeah, that's pretty much it for the audio spectrum itself. And like I mentioned, let's head over to the Facts panel again. Let's grab Mini Max, Mini Max for our next effect.

Now, what Mini Max does it can contract or expand the edges of a layer in this case are audio spectrum effect so it can cover the whole screen. And we're actually going to be framing this. So let's move the Playhead to the origin over here. And I want to set my mini max radius to zero. I'm going to with my audio spectrum layer selected I want you to see all my keyframes.

Let's move this guy about one second in, maybe one second and come on. Oh, wait. I don't even realize that I already had my timeline set so I can see one second, and then we're going to hit radius again. We've got zero here, zero here. The idea is that we want it to spike up and then set back to zero.

So I'm going to place somewhere in the middle and we're going to put this radius up like real high I want it at,000. I want it to be very big and now you may not be seeing anything, but that's because I want to resetting the channel to alpha and color. Whoa. See, that's what we want. That's what we want.

So controls everything in this layer. All right, I'm just going to put down shrink edges just in case but you don't have to do that. All right? And then I want to select shift, select the first and last mini max keyframes. Go to keep a consistent and easy is just to get a bit of a smoother feel to the animation like that.

OK, now we are going to add pasteurized time effect. And the reason for that is that I want more of that stuttering, choppy kind of look that you'll see on this kind of you know, this kind of effect in in the real-world. So I want a pasteurized time effect. So let's get that over on to our layer and I want to set the frame rate to 12.

So basically what that means, it's running on TOS, which is, which is industry vernacular for 12 frames a second versus the typical 24 or 30 frames per second. Yeah. And it gives it more of a choppy look, which is what I'm going for and for the color, let's put a gradient ramp on top of it and gradient, gradient and ramp right on top of this.

And I'm going to go to my reading ramp here in effect controls and I want to change one of the colors to like a nice cyan kind of color. And the other one is like this very intense yellow. I want to move the yellow colors a bit closer together like that. I just change the y axis on both of these.

And in fact, I could grab it. I could grab it and move it down. Perfect. OK, and finally, I'm going to zoom out. I controller command minus and I'm going to pull my whole effect down below here. So next I'm going to be pulling my effect down below the screen. When it spikes, it will cover the whole screen.

Although I'm seeing right now it doesn't cover the entire screen. So I'm actually going to change my radius to be bigger. There we go. Now I've got it at 1200. That'll do it. OK, great. You know what I think I actually even want to adjust my yellow color. Woo. So it's like a little more of a gradient. There we go.

Now for the grid. So I'm going to select both my sound layer and the audio spectrum layer, and we're going to turn this into a pre comp because I want this to be able to have certain effects only available within pre comps. I'm going to name it pre comp and we're going to double click to go inside of it.

Here it is I'm actually going to expand my time line a little bit so I could see more of what's going on in my keyframe so I can see what the timing is on stuff. OK, right. Now we want to make a grid, so we're going to make a new black solid layer, new solid, and we are going to name this grid come on, keyboard work, here we go.

And then we're going to type in Grid into our effects panel and we want this to turn into a grid. So you place that grid effect on your new black solid. I'm actually going to color code this. So it's like a different color. So I can tell which ones are grid, which ones not and I want to change the color of the grid to black.

We're going to be using this thing as a track matte, which means that we want the audio spectrum layer to take its cue from the grid shape, meaning we're going to tell the audio spectrum layer. You can only appear in these certain areas according to this grid layer. And I'll show you what I mean as we go along.

We're going to change the border to make it nice and thick. Now that we have our grid in place, we're going to activate this preserve transparency kind of thing. If you don't see it hit toggle switches and modes and basically anything that is outside of the audio spectrum layer is going to be essentially cut off. So after that, we head back to our income and we're going to type in a glow in our effect some presets.

I already had it typed in, I guess, and we're going to put a glow over audio pre comp. And that's just to give it a bit more of a cyber feel. You don't have to do this, but I like it and I set my glow radius to 15, the glow intensity to 1.5. That's how I like it. And so the last thing I would do is line up your transition your screen wipe with your jump cut.

So I'm going to hide this, I'm going to navigate to where that cut happens. It's like right here, I'm going to turn on my new screen transition and we're going to place where it covers a screen right over my drum cut. And so let's see what that looks like. There we go. It's doing what I wanted to do.

I might actually go back no audio spectrum and like change up where the sound is on the timeline just because I think that it might be more interesting if it has like a little bit more variation as it animates. But that's pretty much it and yeah, so like I mentioned, I personally think that this WIP would look great combined with the project revolving around urban areas, nightlife clubs, music technology, anything like that, you can feel free to adjust the settings which track use for the audio spectrum effect and the colors.

Of course, you can use this in conjunction with animated projects or if you work with live action footage placed over maybe like a drone video of a city at night or a musician at a concert, you know, pretty much up to you. Just couple of ideas and yeah, that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to make your own audio bar transition in Adobe After Effects.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future tutorials, let us know in the comments if you have any motion graphics projects that you're working on. We would love to hear about that. So yeah, this has been Saperstein's four Noble Desktop.