I love animating graphic elements to a good track of music. Over the years I've used a number of methods to make this work. There's the simple method of adding markers on the fly in real time. Or the visual technique of studying the peaks and valleys of the waveform. One of my favorite techniques is converting the music to keyframes and then linking everything up via expressions.
If you'd like to take your animations into beast mode, however, then you'll want to check out the BeatEdit plugin. This tool auto-detects the beats in a music track, and then used that beat information to apply animation presets, write markers, repeat keyframes, stagger layers, and much, much more.
Features
Beat Detection: BeatEdit features a highly accurate Beat Detector developed by universities in Porto (Portugal) and Victoria (Canada). This beat tracker goes way beyond simple peak detection, combining several methods and a great deal of expert knowledge to get accurate results, even with songs where the beat is not obvious.
Markers: Visualize beats as markers in your composition. You can also easily copy, paste and move markers.
Beat Wiggle: Whether you want to animate sliders, 2D or 3D layers or time-remap your footage – the beat wiggle does it all. Endless possibilities, full control and lots of presets. It even supports beat patterns, so the animation behaves differently for each beat.
Repeat Keyframes: BeatEdit can of course repeat your keyframed animations in sync with the beat, but it also comes with a powerful continuous mode which offsets each repetition, so that it starts exactly where the previous one ends.
Stagger Layers & Keyframes: Want your text to appear step by step with the beat, or sync keyframes up to the music? Our stagger features are your best friends!
Beat Selection: BeatEdit gives you full control over which beats your animations react to - you can choose to select only every fourth beat, select beats randomly, or subdivide the beats. BeatEdit can even react to other rhythmically relevant points of your music to create even more variation.
Beat-Tracking Tech
The BeatEdit plugin uses highly robust beat tracking technologies developed by music research groups around the globe. The beat tracker used (IBT) is developed by the Sound and Music Computing Group at the INESC University of Porto . BeatEdit also relies on the MARSYAS (Music Analysis, Retrieval and Synthesis for Audio Signals) framework developed under the direction of George Tzanetakis, Associate Professor at the University of Victoria.
You can get this powerful After Effects plugin for $149.99 at Aescripts.com.
Disclosure: Boone Loves Video is a participant in affiliate advertising programs designed to provide means for individuals to earn advertising fees by reviewing and linking to products.
