Editing and Animating to Sound with Adobe After Effects

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.

Learning objectives
Reading an audio waveform
Spotting "hit points" in dialog and music
Placing markers
Creating a click track
Cutting, crossfading, and time-warping video to music
Timing visual events to music
Timing animation to music
Converting audio to keyframes
Motion sketching to music