Audio Visualizer + Custom Background in Adobe After Effects

By Giovanni Peresson 11/05/2023

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The Idea:

For this project, I set myself out with the goal of creating an audio visualizer video with a custom background made fully from scratch without using any stock footage or other pre-composed materials. you see this style of music video frequently on the youtube platform and is popular for song remixes for example Ma Fo or NCS. This style can be found quite frequently for a number of reasons, the first being ease of use, the majority of videos that use the audio visualizer have static images in the background and this can lead to quite quick production times in terms of creating a video as these channels generally upload daily or sometimes even multiple times per day.

When it comes to the background I wanted to experiment with both the motion title tool in after effects and also continue practicing working with a 3d timeline as I have in my previous blog Creating a virtual sky in After Effects: My Process and Reflection. I would be using different techniques to create the background this time but still consisting of creating a virtual background.

My Process: The Background

To begin the background I would be used for

this scene I created a new composition in After Effects and using the pen tool I made a line and then duplicated it and rotated it by 90 degrees to create a cross as my shape that I would use as my basic shape. I then precomposed the object and changed the timeline resolution to 400 x 400 for optimization

Then I created a new layer and turned the scene into a 3d spectrum and changed the x,y, and z-axis to have the cross go from the bottom left pointing to the top right. Then using the tile motion effect I made the crosses cover the entire scene and moved the origin so that I would be able to cover the screen with as few as possible to yet again improve optimization and reduce render times

I changed the color of my shape to a baby blueish and then created an adjustment layer above and in effects, I added blur and sharpen and set the blur to 60% and then I duplicated the adjustment layer twice to give a light haze around the cross. I then added some gain just to give it a less artificial look to simulate a camera.

Next, I created a new layer and used a dark gray as my background color and placed it behind the cross-layer then using the pen tool created an isometric plane which I would then use as my source for adding another blur effect over the entire scene to create a depth of field to simulate focus.

For the last step in the background, I decided to create an animation of the crosses moving from left to right. I used keyframes and the transformation tools to create the movement and set it to move on cross forward in the space of 2 seconds to create a slow fluid motion, I then looped it to create a continuous scene which I would then add my visualizer to.

The Audio Visualizer

I started off with a new composition and imported the song I would be using which I sourced from the youtube audio library which has a wide range of royalty-free music. I then created a new solid layer and created an elliptical mask which I then shaped into a circle.

On this layer, I then added the audio visualizer

effect and set its source to my circular mask which shaped it into a circle. I then set the inner and outer colors to white, reduced the thickness, and added more bands.

I then imported my After Effects project files into Premier Pro where I would combine the song, background, and audio visualizer and then just added my website's logo to it to just simulate it being an actual video being uploaded by a brand.

References:

MA FO

NCS

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