This expression will set the opacity of the mouth open layer to the value of the keyframes for the Both Channels slider effect. Your expression should now be thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Both Channels")("Slider") Let go to insert the expression into your text editor for the Opacity of the Mouth Open layer. Then take the pick whip icon on the Opacity property and drag it onto the Both Channels Slider property. Then reveal the opacity property of the open mouth layer and alt-click on the stopwatch icon to add an expression to it. Since we want to link the value of the Both Channels slider effect to another property in our composition, make sure the Audio Amplitude layer is expanded so you can see the effect and its keyframes. Select a good average value that indicates that the person is talking. To determine the volume threshold to control the visibility of the open mouth, scrub through your footage and have a look at the Both Channels slider value during the lows and highs. While this won’t be perfectly natural, it’ll be enough to convey the feeling of the puppet talking. This will make it appear as if the mouth opens whenever the puppet talk. We want the open mouth to only be visible whenever the audio level is above a certain level. Let’s hook the visibility of the open mouth layer up to the Both Channels slider so it only becomes visible whenever the volume of the audio goes above a certain level. If you’re unfamiliar with expressions, check out my separate Adobe After Effects Expressions tutorial.
The 3 slider effects have been keyframed to represent the volume of the left, the right and both channels of the audio layer.Īs you know, by themselves, these sliders have no effect on anything in your composition, but we can hook up effect parameters and layer properties to them using expressions.
After effects volume control how to#
Check out my After Effects Expression Controls tutorial if you want to learn what they are for and how to use them. If you expand the layer you will see 3 sider expression control effects applied to it. Simply select the audio layer and then go to the main menu and select Animation -> Keyframe Assistant -> Convert Audio to Keyframes.Ī new Null Object called ‘Audio Amplitude’ will be created in your composition. To convert the volume of this audio layer to keyframes, you can use the Keyframe Assistant. When you expand the layer, Adobe After Effects will display the waveform for the audio track. You can use any other audio clip as well, but for this tutorial it would make more sense to have a simple voice audio track of someone talking. Import an audio clip into the composition. Now it’s time to extract the keyframes from our audio clip! Extracting Keyframes from Audio Well, as realistic as you get with puppets! This will blend the mouth more cleaner with the cutout image and instantly look more realistic. Apply the Matte Choker to the open mouth layer and increase the Choke as well as the Geometric Softness to smoothen out the edges a bit more. While you can use masks to soften the edges, a much simpler way is to use the Matte Choker effect. Notice that the edges of the mouth are fairly harsh. If you toggle the visibility of the mouth, it should look as if your puppet was talking. Scale it down and position it so it sits precisely over my closed mouth. Import the image of the open mouth into your project and place it in your composition, on top of the cutout layer.
After effects volume control download#
You can download the image by clicking on this link. I tool a photo of myself with my mouth open and then cut out only the mouth. Next, you need an image of an open mouth. Scale it down so it sits nicely in the centre of the screen. To start off, create a new composition and import the cutout of me that you can download here.
This tutorial will take you through that process. I did not want to animate the mouth by hand because it would have been much too tedious and decided to use the Audio to Keyframes conversion in After Effects to make this job a lot easier for me. I animated the mouth to open in sync with the audio to make it look like a South Park character talking.
For example, I used it to animate the opening/closing mouth for the puppet in my After Effects Puppet Tool tutorial. This technique is very easy to do and opens up the possibilities to create amazing music visualisations or simplify a lot of common tasks. This can be done by extracting keyframes for the volume of the audio clip and using simple expressions to use these keyframes to drive any effect parameter or layer property you want. You can easily sync your effects and animations with audio in Adobe After Effects.