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Equalizer with custom objects (with or/3d)
Hi!
I’m kinda new to After Effects, done some infographiocs so i know the basics. What i want to achive (sorry for crude pain visualisation) is equalzier, reacting to music looking like something like image below (fig a).
What i want to achive is each of the crystals would react to music, but i want them to react separately, maybe each of them represeting soem spectrum of music like from 10hz to 100hz, next one from 100 to 200 and so on.
I want to make something like a ring of crystals dancing to music, crystals should grow from center so should be scaled only in one axis.
Another idea is to make em in 3d and place camera overhead (fig B).
I found tutorials how to make object react to music, but objects in them react to whole spectrum, and i dont want my crystals to jsut scale up as a whole.
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2 Replies
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With just AE, you can choose ‘Convert Audio to Keyframes’ and then use expressions to drive the scale of the crystals. I think is probably the method in the tutorial you mention, and you probably found the limitation that while it could separate left and right stereo tracks, it cannot further separate by frequency.
There was (probably still is) an effect called SoundKeys that could separate audio like that. It was part of the Trapcode Suite that Red Giant distributed. There may be others, or you may be able to find an audio tool that could generate separate tracks and then import those into AE and do the Audio Keyframe trick for each.
But otherwise the set up is pretty simple, create your crystals — can be 2d from Illustrator or Photoshop, or maybe 3D with Cinema 4D light and import into AE to link the scales to the audio. But in any case, you’ll want the anchor points at the base of the crystals so it it looks like they grow/shrink with the music.
FYI, the Audio Spectrum effect has a ‘Polar Path’ option that does scale out lines from the center, and the effect does separate frequencies… similar to what you are looking for. But I don’t know of a way to use that for what you are trying to accomplish.
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As you’ve mentioned, the built-in After Effects tools for dealing with audio react only to amplitude.
There’s a third-party tool called SoundKeys that responds to frequency ranges as you’re looking for:
https://www.maxon.net/en/red-giant-complete/trapcode-suite/sound-keysI suppose that you could also build your own by pre-processing the audio in Premiere or Audition with hi and low passes into the frequency bands that you want, then using the built-in amplitude tools on those frequency-banded passes.
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