I’m sure most of us ran into situations where we wanted to animate certain layers to audio in action. There are actually two ways of doing this. One within the FFI environment and the second method is by using after effects. We’ll talk about the after effects way first.

 

1. Make a new composition in after effects. Bring in the audio file and place it in the comp.
2. Make a new solid (white color) that is relatively small (25X25 pixels).
3. Select the solid than choose Animation/keyframe assistant/motion math
4. Once the box opens hit load and find the “motion math scripts” in the application directory. choose the file called “layer audio remap.mm”
5. You’ll probably have to tweak the settings of the max/min values. I used 100 and -100
6. Select the first layer to the solid. under property choose position. then for channel you can select either x or y. then for layer 2 select the audio file. choose audio levels for the property and all for the channels. afterwards just hit apply and it will analize and assign keyframes to the y postion of the solid layer. Again you might need to tweak the max/min values in the script to get it move noticebly in composition window. just make sure the box does not go off the screen area.
7. Once you have the postitioning that you like render out the comp as your choice to sequential files. then export to FFI.
8. After the rendered frames are imported in to FFI. Go into action, load the action file that has the object that you want to animate to audio is in.
9. Load the newly imported “box animation” as background and track it. I used a dummy axis for tracking so that I can control the values with expressions on the final target.
10. Now you can animate any of the properties of the layer in sync with your audio.

That’s it. hope someone finds it helpful on there projects as I did. I’ll touch on the second way of doing this at a later point. Have fun 🙂

 

Submitter: Michael Yoon