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Animating to music
Hello All…
I am trying to animate to a 5-minute piece of music using after effects v7, and was wondering if there was any plugin or patch that would allow me to play the music back as I’m animating as I need the 2 to synchronize pretty accurately. If anyone has any suggestions at all or knows of any alternative options, id really appreciate it,
cheers,
Sarah -
7 Replies
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Hold down Command while you scrub your timeline. Unless your on Windows. Then, I’m not sure Command will work. Maybe try Control. Actually, just get a Mac and use Command.
The decimal point on the keypad will play an audio preview based your AE preferences.
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You can also RAM preview your footage and then hit the keypad asterisk key in order to generate a marker while it’s playing. This is very useful for tapping out markers based on a rhythm or beat.
You won’t see them made until you stop the RAM preview playback, but just play the footage, tap away at the asterisk key at the beats where you want things to be animated, and you’ll have automatically generated markers exactly where you want things to go.
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Marco Salsiccia
Engineer of Insurrection
Digital Anarchy -
“LL” on a selected layer reveals the Audio’s waveform, this along with the suggestions above can be useful when animating to music.
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Trapcode “Soundkeys” is also very helpful for this kind of thing
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Most newbies to AE are disappointed in AE’s audio preview method and assume 4-8 seconds of audio preview is an unworkable and lame interface design.
As much as you think you must hear the entire audio portion of your sequence, you cannot work on more than a few frames at a time in After Effects. A few seconds is all the audio you need.
Another mistake newbies make is assuming After Effects is useful as a nonlinear editor. It’s an effects system, not an assembly platform. Trying to edit in AE is frustrating at best, a total waste of time at worst. Create your individual effects shots and pull them back into your nle.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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thanks for all your help…
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Hi,
If i’m animating alot of elements to complicated music I’ll put my audio onto the timeline in Final Cut Pro, and i’ll manually write down ‘key frames’ on a piece of paper as I storyboard. It can take some time depending on your music but it’s worked really well for me. Give it a try maybe…
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