Tweaking the strobe light effect

[Michael Szalapski]

Have you looked at this resource: [link]? It explains the various parameters of the effect.

Basically, you need to keyframe the strobe period and the strobe duration to be smaller numbers over time. Strobe duration always needs to be smaller than strobe period. In fact, it might be easier to make a simple expression in the strobe duration that just takes the strobe period and divides by two. 🙂

– 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.

[Randy Gallagher]

I have looked at the link in fact that was the first that I looked at, however I am unsure on how to get the exact results that I need. I read somewhere that this is based on seconds versus frames, which I would prefer.

Either way do you know of a place where I can learn more about the expressions and adding them to the compositions. I am fairly new to AE and understand that the expressions can be added for desired effects but I am unsure on the variables and syntax that I should use.

Thanks for the help so far I really appreciate it.

For your above recommendation are you saying that I should add an expression such as

time/2?
strobe/2?

What/2?

[Michael Szalapski]

You would need to alt-click the stopwatch for strobe duration.
Pickwhip to the value for strobe period.
Then type /2

For more on learning expressions, check out Dan Ebberts’ site: https://www.motionscript.com/ Also, the AE help pages on expressions aren’t bad.

Also, just pay attention as you go through tutorials here or on VideoCopilot.net, they will occasionally use expressions to make things easier. The more you see them in use, the more you’ll understand how to use them.

– 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.

[Randy Gallagher]

Sorry to keep bothering you over something probably so simple but I want to make sure that I learn this and get it right. I looked at the link that you gave me and that was very helpful but now I am stuck again.

Here is my waveform that I converted my audio into:

Looking at this I really can’t create a threshold to write an expression around so I pose this question:

How would I write an expression that would change the color one layer to white only on the peaks of the audio? Basically ( and I know this isn’t java)

if(the waveform peaks, flash contents of layer white, do nothing)

I was looking at another effect, change to color, would that work if I just set it to each key frame that the audio peaked manually.

Thanks for the help and again I am sorry for asking so many questions about something that seem so simple. I really want to expand my knowledge here not just pump out crappy videos.