How to achieve this “throbbing background” effect?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It is green screen with a background plate. You’ll find various scripts and utilities that can keyframe a layers attributes based on audio if you’d like to automate the motion.

Beyond that, if you don’t have a greenscreen and a plate, you would need to take a frame, paint out your actor for a clean plate, and then place it under a rotoscoped version of your footage.

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Angelo Lorenzo

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[Todd Kopriva]

Specifically, once you have a separate background layer, you would animate the scale (or one of the Distort effects) and use one or more blur effects to get the result that I saw.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Vishesh Arora]

Johnny

As Todd said Animating the scale parameter and using a blur effect could create the desired look.

Check the Example:
5524_throbbingeffectae.zip

Instead of any blur effect, I just used the Native Motion Blur of AE. Though you can use a blur effect to enhance the effect.

Vishesh Arora
3D and Motion Graphics Artist
Films Rajendra

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