Editing and Animating to Sound with Adobe After Effects

Learn to tightly synchronize your video and animation to your audio—be it music or speech.

Want to raise the impact of your edits and animations? One of the secrets is to tightly synchronize them to your audio—be it music or speech. If you cut video to follow major events in the soundtrack, or use audio to drive animation with the help of keyframe assistants, expressions, and effects, you can create a more compelling cinematic experience.

In this course, Chris Meyer teaches you how to "read" an audio waveform to spot the most interesting points to animate to, and then presents a variety of ideas for cutting video and animating movements to match your soundtrack. This includes timing transitions, making staccato cuts, matching the frame rate to the tempo, wiggling in time, expressing animations to sound, motion sketching to music, and more. Although these tricks will be demonstrated inside Adobe After Effects, the techniques themselves are applicable to virtually any editing or animation package.

This course was created and produced by Chris and Trish Meyer. We are honored to host this content in our library.

Introduction

• Course preview
• Using the exercise files

1. Marking Sonic Events

• Reading an audio waveform
• Spotting beats in music
• Placing markers
• Adding notes
• Spotting words in dialogue
• Musical math
• Creating a click track

2. Cutting Video to Sound

• Spotting a soundtrack
• Cutting video to music
• Timing visual events to music
• The timing and feel of transitions
• Staccato cuts
• Case study: Cuts and fades
• Case study: Reading text

3. Timing Animation to Music

• Timing a text animation
• Keyframing effects
• Matching frame rate to tempo
• Wiggling in time to music
• Case study: All together now
• Time remapping

4. Having Audio Drive Your Animation

• Converting audio to keyframes
• Expressing animations to sound
• Faux lip sync
• Motion sketching to music

Conclusion

• Goodbye