Control Text Glow with Audio in After Effects

With a Glow Effect added to your text and an audio track in the composition, the first step is to right-click on the audio track and select Keyframe Assistant – Convert Audio to Keyframes. This creates a new layer called Audio Amplitude, which houses our keyframes. In this example, we just need to reference the keyframes under Both Channels. We want these keyframes to manipulate Glow Threshold, so we’ll set a keyframe by alt-click or opt-click on the stopwatch.

An expression for Glow Theshold appears. We can pickwhip from there to the Audio Amplitude Both Channels Slider. If we play our timeline now, the inverse is happening. We see the glow when there are low sounds versus the louder sounds. This is because Glow Threshold shows more glow when the value is lower, not higher.

To fix this, let’s find what the value of the slider is at a peak audio wave. In this example, it is about 17 or 18. So, let’s alter our expression to get a value near this. Here, if I type in 30 and subtract the rest of the expression… 30-17 will give us 13, which is a perfect Glow Threshold value to show the glow we want in this instance.

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