• Adobe After Effects

  Need to add audio to text effect

  Posted by Jordan Drake on November 24, 2009 at 6:17 am

  Hey folks – relatively new to After Affects… but not new to the forum environment – here are the basics before I ask my question.
  I’m running a macbook pro 17in – 4gb of RAM – Snow Leopard – and the latest version of After Effects (9.0 I think)

  I’m working on documentary style project that is based on a military training event. To add some cool military stylings – I’m putting all of the titling in a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare theme – so all my text looks something like this – https://tinyurl.com/yjskkkg – all of the text also appears in the video using the shuffle animation effect – so as each character appears – it is preceded by random characters before it – hence a shuffling effect.

  What I’m trying to add – is the sound effect used in the modern warfare style – kind of a digitized typing sound that syncs perfectly with the text as it is typed onto the screen (they type it out in MW2 – I’m going to have it decode – same effect though) – here is an example – https://tinyurl.com/ydmywcb

  Any ideas on how to make this work? do I need a plugin? do I have to add 200 sound bites for each character:-)?

  Thanks in advance.

  J Drake

  Michael Szalapski replied 16 years, 9 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  David Johnson

  November 24, 2009 at 12:38 pm

  There are tons of sound FX available on the web and many of them are free … try searching the “Free Stuff” forum here on the COW and Google.
• 

  Dominik Gut

  November 24, 2009 at 1:20 pm

  Hey Jordan,

  Depending on what exactly you want accomplish, I suggest you two approaches:

  1) A more emotional/human approach:
  First make your soundlayer with samples from the web (eg. freesound.iua.upf.edu) or soundtrack pro from final cut pro.
  Make this sound as lively and natural as possible.
  Then do your textanimation in after effects, where you can animate already typed text character by character. there are many tutorials on this.
  I guess this is the easiest way.

  2) a more mathematical approach:
  with plugins like soundeffector for after effects or the sound plugin from mograph for Cinema4D you can load your soundfile and let something (here characters) appear on every beep, or click of your soundfile.
  But I guess this is a very annoying way to get what you are looking for…

  best regards, Dominik.

  http://www.phirstfilm.com

  Phirstfilm Productions GmbH
  film and animation for business solutions

  Zurich, Switzerland
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  November 24, 2009 at 9:58 pm

  Dave = right. AE is not an editing program at all.

  But you don’t have to have the sound synced perfectly to the animation either, unless I totally misunderstand what you’re doing. You just have fast changing text, so get (or create) a fast bleeping/blipping/swishing/clicking/whatever sound and play them together. Most of the time it’ll look like it’s synced up without you having to do anything.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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